 Capitalism is liberating: You’re born a peasant but you don’t have to die one. You can work hard and get a nice place in the suburbs. If you were a 19th century Russian peasant and you got to Ellis Island, you’d be living in a tenement on the Lower East Side, but your kids would get an education and move uptown, and your grandkids would be doctors and accountants in Westchester County. And your great-grandchild would be a Harvard-educated environmental activist demanding an end to all this electricity and indoor toilets. Environmentalism opposes that kind of mobility
Mark Steyn
The Ecopalypse
[Steve Wolfer said,] "If you insist on changing all of the dominant philosophy of our culture all at once, you can't get there from here." Well, that's the dirty little secret of the Left, isn't it? Attacks on personal liberty (e.g., bans on foodstuffs and toilets that flush) and bizarre movements toward some utopia divorced from reality (gay marriage and rights for orangutans) can proceed as fast as our chubby little minds can imagine. But real solutions to real problems (allowing drilling in ANWR, slogging it out with the terror states) are forbidden because in reality such things take time to implement and to show results. The Left doesn't want anything that will actually work and hence will actually need time to work. It wants the immediate satisfaction of forbidding, of fiats, of a false sense of ethical superiority. Never actually wanting to arrive anywhere, the Left pretends it can close its eyes and click its heels, and not wishing to get there from here it need never expend the effort to depart.
Ted Keer
Would you register for the Objectivist party?
[Y]ou ask him what does he regard the facts of reality as: a necessity or a contingency? He'll say, 'Of course it's a contingency, because God made it this way, and he could have made it another.' And you say, 'Good-bye.'
Ayn Rand
Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology
But what would happen if administrative capability were to evolve to make it possible "to subject all of his subjects to the details of a uniform set of regulations"? That moment has now arrived.
Mark Steyn
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124631535597970609.html
I have been on the record since the 1990s as strongly opposing hate crimes legislation. I think it is a totalitarian intrusion into citizens' thought processes. Government functionaries should not be ceded the dangerous authority to make decisions about motivation. They aren't novelists, psychologists or sibyls! Furthermore, there should be no special privileged class of protected groups in a democracy. A crime is a crime -- period.
Camille Paglia
Camille Paglia at Salon
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.
Theodor Seuss Geisel
They are the biggest of the big — the Citigroups, the Goldman Sachses, the AIGs and other financial behemoths. The Obama administration doesn't want so many around anymore.
The Associated Press
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31711461/ns/business-stocks_and_economy
I am extremely proud of my compatriots. Finally, we have decided to stand up and become a country of laws, not men. From now on, here in Honduras, no one will be above the law.
Octavio Sanchez
http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0702/p09s03-coop.html
Know what the hell is going on and what you are doing - that should be a big goal for Objectivists in general anyway.
Kurt Eichert
Hope versus Reality
And any scum-sucking scoundrel who points out that "doing nothing" already includes spending billions on renewable energies and living under thousands of regulations is, as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman shrewdly noted, a traitor to humankind.
David Harsanyi
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/07/01/lets_do_something_--_anything_97252.html
The truth is, however, that only one reality exists.
Wafa Sultan
Who Should We Believe?
I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can…I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work – the more I live
George Bernard Shaw
Seen on a billboard memorial for a dead Obstetrician in New Jersey
I won't just imply it - I'll state it out-right - There must be a government monopoly on law. There can be but one set of laws for a given jurisdiction. Period. There is a huge, enormous, unbridgable gap between minarchy and 'anarcho-capitalism.' Minarchy and 'anarcho-capitalism' are so far apart as to be opposites. Capitalism can only exist if there is the freedom for markets to function. And there can be no freedom for markets without the protection of individual rights. People require the protection of person and property against the intiation of force, fraud and theft to make markets free - to open the door for competition. And that requires laws that define those rights.
Steve Wolfer
Is Taxation an Initiation of Force?
Objectivism needs to be cut down to its roots and thoroughly re-evaluated and understood apart from all its principals, past and present. Most people--Objectivists--do not understand the actual terrifying simplicity of Objectivism and that the complexity and difficulty is in the details of living an individual life.
Brant Gaede
Simple Exercise thread on the Valliant fiasco at Wikipedia
Neda died with open eyes. Shame on us who live with closed eyes.
Unknown Iranian
John McCain, The US Senate
Make no mistake, these are murders, not "killings," or "deaths," but murders. Obama "supporters" were all fine with the fact that Barry had precious little to say about the murder of unarmed Iranians in the street, and I found that amazingly unforgivable
Teresa Summerlee Isanhart
Peace at Any Price
I've never bought into [sacrifice as the moral ideal]. Call me an Objectivist, call me what you will.
Jason Lewis (Radio Host)
http://www.jasonlewisshow.com/main.html
Socialists [believe in evolution in biology, in the survival of the fittest. But not in economics.] Economically, these people will take monkey tails and staple them to our backs.
Glenn Beck
Glenn Beck with Yaron Brook
"There is no such thing as a good excuse."
John P. Grier
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_P._Grier
[The Iranian] people aren't dying in the street because they want a recount of hanging chads in suburban Isfahan. They want to bring down the tyrannical, misogynist, corrupt theocracy that has imposed itself with the very baton-wielding goons that today attack the demonstrators. This started out about election fraud. But like all revolutions, it has far outgrown its origins. What's at stake now is the very legitimacy of this regime -- and the future of the entire Middle East.
Charles Krauthammer
Obama Clueless on Iran
Is the Rev. Jeremiah Wright a better role model than Martin Luther King? It's a damned shame that our first minority president wasn't a veteran of our civil-rights struggle, rather than its privileged beneficiary.
Ralph Peters
Green Light for a Crackdown
You can live as free men, but, if you choose not to, your society will die.
Mark Steyn
Live Free or Die
It must have been the viewing angle: The despots who run Iran somehow missed the halo gracing President Obama during his recent sermon to the Muslim world.
Ralph Peters
The Obama Effect
Obama offered Muslims a careful admonition about women's rights, noting how denying women education impoverishes a country -- balanced, of course, with "meanwhile, the struggle for women's equality continues in many aspects of American life." Well, yes. On the one hand, there certainly is some American university where the women's softball team has received insufficient Title IX funds -- while, on the other hand, Saudi women showing ankle are beaten in the street, Afghan school girls have acid thrown in their faces, and Iranian women are publicly stoned to death for adultery. (Gays, as well -- but then again we have Prop 8.) We all have our shortcomings, our national foibles. Who's to judge?
Charles Krauthammer
Obama on High
If the average American were asked his opinion of congressmen, among the more polite terms you'll hear are thieves and crooks, liars and manipulators, hustlers and quacks. But what do the same people say when our nation faces a major problem? "Government ought to do something!"
Walter E. Williams
http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=5540
No law in any state in the United States now or ever has forbidden homosexuals to marry. The law has never asked that a man prove his heterosexuality in order to marry a woman, or a woman hers in order to marry a man.
Orson Scott Card
Homosexual "Marriage" and Civilization
What does it say about her qualifications to be on the Supreme Court when her supporters' biggest talking points are that she had to struggle to rise in the world? Bonnie and Clyde had to struggle. Al Capone had to struggle. The only President of the United States who was forced to resign for his misdeeds-- Richard Nixon-- had to struggle. For that matter, Adolf Hitler had to struggle! There is no evidence that struggle automatically makes you a better person.
Thomas Sowell
Out of Context II
The code word for the new racism is 'diversity.' The Constitution of the United States says nothing about diversity and the Constitution is what a judge is supposed to pay attention to, not the prevailing buzzwords of the times.
Thomas Sowell
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/06/02/out_of_context_part_ii_96786.html
In the history of developed democracies with literate publics served by mass media, there is no precedent for today's media enlistment in the crusade to promote global warming "awareness." Concerning this, journalism, which fancies itself skeptical and nonconforming, is neither.
George Will
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/06/04/green_with_guilt_96828.html
[Pres. Obama] has left the concept of legal - he makes decrees. He got the spending via 'legitimate' vote... but no one challenged the constitutionality of TARP or the Stimulus bills. And no one is fighting against his ignoring the few limits on those new laws - he spends it where he wants, and makes decrees that have no law behind them (like firing the GM president, like setting salaries and bonuses). Law is the only tether to justice and the organized protection of rights. It has to be observed, now it isn't.
Steve Wolfer
http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/Quotes/1444.shtml#7
Hey, Obama has just nationalized nothing more and nothing less than General Motors. Comrade Obama! Fidel, careful or we are going to end up to his right.
Hugo Chavez
On Venezuelan state TV Reuters
We have borrowed more money in the last 6 months than the previous 30 years.
Steven Moore
Fox News - Glen Beck Show - 6/4/2009
Racism has never done this country any good, and it needs to be fought against, not put under new management for different groups.
Thomas Sowell
"Out of Context?" Op. Ed. on the Sotomayor nomination.
In 1963, when a benefactor offered to fund a chapel [at Churchill College, Cambridge], and Crick’s fellow Fellows voted to accept the money, Crick refused to accept the argument that many at the college would appreciate a place of worship and that those who didn’t were not obliged to enter it. [Crick] offered to fund a brothel on the same basis, and, when that was rejected, he resigned.
Mark Steyn
Obituary of Sir Francis Crick
North Korea is like a dog. If you feed him every time he pees on the rug, then he'll continue to pee on the rug. There's no reason for Kim Jong-il not to pee on our rug.
Lt. Col. Gordon Cucullu
Washington Times
I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.
Robert Anson Heinlein
We'd like for sure and rapid punishment to have some preventative effect, but when the gov't starts looking for ways to use their guns to prevent them from having to use their guns, there's a problem.
Ryan Keith Roper
http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/NewsDiscussions/2423.shtml#2
Whatever the verbal fencing over the meaning of the word "torture," there is a fundamental difference between simply inflicting pain on innocent people for the sheer pleasure of it-- which is what our terrorist enemies do-- and getting life-saving information out of the terrorists by whatever means are necessary.
Thomas Sowell
Debate Over 'Torture' Lacks Seriousness (Thanks, Joe.)
If you think Allah is great, you should try these dinner rolls.
Ann Coulter
Ann Coulter on "Gitmo Gut"
If financial institutions won't cooperate with us, we will assume that they are sheltering money in tax havens and act accordingly
President Obama
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103790910&ft=1&f=1014
We must spend now as an investment for the future.
President Obama
You're right, we did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again.
Ben Bernanke, in a speech on Milton Friedman's 90th birthday acknowledging the Fed's role in deepening the Great Depression, Nov. 8, 2002
Business Week, April 27, 2009
The People of Virginia declare and make known that the powers granted under the Constitution being derived from the People of the United States may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression and that every power not granted thereby remains with them and at their will.
State of Virgina's Ratification of the US Constitutional
http://townhall.com/columnists/WalterEWilliams/2009/04/22/parting_company?page=1
If you don't think government bureaucrats can make questionable decisions, then you haven't dealt with many government bureaucrats.
Thomas Sowell
http://townhall.com/columnists/ThomasSowell/2009/04/22/words_versus_realities
I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for public charity. [To approve the measure] would be contrary to the letter and spirit of the Constitution and subversive to the whole theory upon which the Union of these States is founded.
Franklin Pierce
-- President Franklin Pierce's 1854 veto of a measure to help the mentally ill.
The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit, and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests or the strong prejudices which may oppose it: he seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board; he does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it.
Adam Smith
The Theory of Moral Sentiments VI,II,2
You too can have the soothing feeling of nature's own baby-soft wool being pulled gently over your resting eyes
Herbert Lawrence (Herblock) Block
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/04/random_thoughts_4.html
"We have earthquakes but then we forget and do nothing. It's not in our culture to take precautions or build in an appropriate way in areas where there could be strong earthquakes,"
Enzo Boschi
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L6566682.htm
Obama is a leveler. He has come to narrow the divide between rich and poor. For him the ultimate social value is fairness. Imposing it upon the American social order is his mission.
Charles Krauthammer
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/04/obamas_ultimate_agenda.html
Most of our nation's great problems, including our economic problems, have as their root decaying moral values.
Walter E. Williams
http://townhall.com/Columnists/WalterEWilliams/2009/04/01/our_problem_is_immorality
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