Quotations Compiled by Val Kornea

`To question, to tremble with the craving and the joy of questioning [...] this feeling is the first thing I seek in everyone: some foolishness persuades me ever and again that every human being has this feeling, as a human being. It is my kind of injustice.` Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) `A fiery desire should develop in everybody to be in one's quest for knowledge full of a strong consuming fire, ever offering oneself as the first sacrifice to the truth one recognizes.` Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) `I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live by the light that I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right, and stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong.` Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) `If my love of truth is left as my only possession, then the greater the loss behind me, the greater the pride I may take in the price I have paid for that love.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982) as Hank Rearden, Atlas Shrugged `Fear not the path of truth for the lack of people walking on it.` Arabic Proverb `He who has the truth for friend Has one true friend to the end.` Brian Faulkner (b.1946) `Subtlety may deceive you; integrity never will.` Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) `Truth never damages a cause that is just.` Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) `That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.` P. C. Hodgell (b.1951) `One must never ask whether the truth will be useful or whether it may become one's fatality.` Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) `We can have no opinions about Truth.` The Book of Dawn and Dusk, The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind `The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.` Aristotle (384BC-322BC) `People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I've learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one's reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one's master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person's view requires to be faked. And if one gains the immediate purpose of the lie--the price one pays is the destruction of that which the gain was intended to serve. The man who lies to the world, is the world's slave from then on.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Atlas Shrugged `An attempt to gain a value by deceiving the mind of others is an act of raising your victims to a position higher than reality, where you become a pawn of their blindness, a slave of their non-thinking and their evasions, while their intelligence, their rationality, their perceptiveness become the enemies you have to dread and flee.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Atlas Shrugged `Self-esteem is reliance on one's power to think. It cannot be replaced by one's power to deceive. The self-confidence of a scientist and the self-confidence of a con man are not interchangeable states, and do not come from the same psychological universe. The success of a man who deals with reality augments his self-confidence. The success of a con man augments his panic.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), The Return of the Primitive `Man's basic vice, the source of all his evils, is the act of unfocusing his mind, the suspension of his consciousness, which is not blindness, but the refusal to see, not ignorance, but the refusal to know.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982) `You can't hide from the truth, because the truth is all there is.` Song Lyric `To fear to face an issue is to believe that the worst is true.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Atlas Shrugged `It's always better to know.` Dr. Gregory House, `House` `The truth is always more interesting than your preconception of what it might be.` Steven Levy (b.1951) `A corrected mistake ceases to exist; an evaded mistake lives forever. It is no virtue to be consistent with one's past mistakes.` Val Kornea (b.1979) `He that respects himself is safe from others. He wears a coat of mail that none can pierce.` Henry Wadsworth Longfellow `If we're going to be damned, let's be damned for what we really are.` Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek: The Next Generation `To believe in something and not to live it, is dishonest.` Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) `The mountain remains unmoved at seeming defeat by the mist.` Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) `Be sure you put your feet in the right place, then stand firm.` Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) `To sin by silence when they should protest, makes cowards of men.` Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1919), An Ambitious Man `He who trims himself to suit everyone will soon whittle himself away.` Raymond Hull (1919-1985) `He who dares not offend cannot be honest.` Thomas Paine (1737-1809), To Cato `You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.` Winston Churchill (1874-1965) `Intellectual honesty consists in taking ideas seriously. To take ideas seriously means that you intend to live by, to practice, any idea you accept as true.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982) `Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven, and you are answerable, not for the rightness, but uprightness of the decision.` Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), Jefferson’s letter to his nephew Peter Carr, from Paris, August 10, 1787. `Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.` Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), Jefferson’s letter to his nephew Peter Carr, from Paris, August 10, 1787. `No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking.` Voltaire (1694-1778) `The man who is without qualification good at deliberating is the man who is capable of aiming in accordance with calculation at the best for man of things attainable by action.` Aristotle (384BC-322BC), Nicomachean Ethics `No mind is worth much that is not present with all its faculties when the need comes for its action.` New Outlook, Volume 29, 1884 `If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.` Albert Einstein (1879-1955) `No mind is better than the precision of its concepts.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal `The investigation of the meaning of words is the beginning of education.` Antisthenes (c.445BCE-365BCE) `The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names.` Chinese proverb `Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), The Romantic Manifesto `If you don't have a solid example then your theory is not a good theory.` Rodney Brooks (b.1954) `It is better to be wrong, than to be vague.` Freeman Dyson (b.1923) `In the animal kingdom, the rule is eat or be eaten. In the human kingdom, define or be defined. Every disagreement in the world is a matter of definition and degree.` Kaylanis Law `The battle for the world is the battle for definitions.` Beverley Eyre `What is good-heartedness, refinement, and genius to me, when the human being who has these virtues tolerates slack feelings in his faith and judgments, and when the demand for certainty is not to him the inmost craving and the deepest need.` Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) `I can accept anything, except what seems to be the easiest for most people: the halfway, the almost, the just-about, the in-between.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), The Fountainhead `Intellectual agnosticism is, in reality, very close to cowardice. The agnostic who claims that his is the more courageous course, that it is easy to jump to a conclusion but hard to keep one's head and "see clearly" despite the mists of passion and prejudice--this man is deceiving himself. It is, on the contrary, easy to reflect on the complexity and many-sidedness of the issues that confront one, and to conclude that no man is capable of seeing the whole truth. What is hard is to hold the evidence clearly in mind and keep it there, persistently turning it over and integrating it until the conclusion emerges.` James J. Gibson (1904-1979) `What objectivity and the study of philosophy require is not an "open mind," but an active mind--a mind able and eagerly willing to examine ideas, but to examine them critically. An active mind does not grant equal status to truth and falsehood; it does not remain floating forever in a stagnant vacuum of neutrality and uncertainty; by assuming the responsibility of judgment, it reaches firm convictions and holds to them.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Philosophy: Who Needs It `Merely having an open mind is nothing; the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.` G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) `It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us into trouble. It's the things we do know that just ain't so.` Unknown `The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance--it is the illusion of knowledge` Daniel J. Boorstin (1914-2004) `The belief in truth begins with the doubt of all truths in which one has previously believed.` Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) `What is wanted is not the will-to-believe, but the wish to find out, which is its exact opposite.` Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) `When you have dedicated your life to a lie, to accept the truth means to accept that you have wasted your life.` Unknown `Attempts to escape nihilism without revaluating our values so far: they produce the opposite, make the problem more acute.` Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) `We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.` C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) `Doubt is the beginning, not the end, of wisdom.` George Iles, Jottings `Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.` George Orwell (1903-1950) `The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), The Fountainhead `Existence exists--and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Atlas Shrugged `Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Atlas Shrugged `Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.` Francis Bacon (1561-1626) `Of course it's the same old story. Truth usually is the same old story.` Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013) `Reality exists as an objective absolute.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Introducing Objectivism `The secrets of this earth are not for all men to see, but only for those who will seek them.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Anthem `Objective means--in effect--a volitional adherence to reality in the process of forming your mental content.` Leonard Peikoff (b.1933) `Reality is an omnipresent context.` Val Kornea (b.1979) `Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Atlas Shrugged `Identity is unaffected by identification.` Val Kornea (b.1979) `To understand the nature of concepts is to see through the Matrix.` Val Kornea (b.1979) `Since in this world liars may win belief, Be sure of the opposite likewise--that this world Hears many a true word and believes it not.` Euripides (~480BC-406BC) in "Thyestes" according to Aristotle in "Rhetoric" `An apprenticeship in reality is more valuable than a masters degree in deception.` Val Kornea (b.1979) `Truth is the best propaganda and lies are the worst. To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful.` Edward R. Murrow (1908-1965) `The truth is more important than your side.` Val Kornea (b.1979) `You may deceive all the people part of the time, and part of the people all the time, but not all the people all the time.` Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) `No man has a good enough memory to make a successful liar.` Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) `If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything.` Mark Twain (1835-1910) `The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere.` Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906-2001) `Only the innocent can afford to be spontaneous.` Val Kornea (b.1979) `No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true.` Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), The Scarlet Letter `He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world's believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions.` Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), 1785 letter to Peter Carr `A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest form of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying--to others and to yourself.` Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), The Brothers Karamazov `One of the greatest moments in anybody's developing experience is when he no longer tries to hide from himself but determines to get acquainted with himself as he really is.` Norman Vincent Peale (1898-1993) `Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.` Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) `I no longer look for the good in people, I search for the real because while the good is often dressed in fake clothing, real is naked and proud no matter the scars.` Chishala Lishomwa `It is far more useful to be aware of a single shortcoming in ourselves than it is to be aware of a thousand in somebody else. For when the fault is our own, we are in a position to correct it.` The Dalai Lama `Know thyself and thou shalt know all the mysteries of the gods and the universe.` Temple of Apollo at Delphi `The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.` Richard Feynman (1918-1988) `Self-criticism, in the sense of an introspective, discriminating activity, is indispensable in any attempt to understand your own psychology. If you have done something that puzzles you and you ask yourself what could have prompted you to such an action, you need the string of bad conscience and its discriminating faculty in order to discover the real motive of your behavior.` Carl Jung (1875-1961), Dogma and Natural Symbols `There is luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel no one else has a right to blame us.` Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) `He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser.` Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) `It is not our disadvantages or shortcomings that are ridiculous, but rather the studious way we try to hide them, and our desire to act as if they did not exist.` Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) `Most of our faults are more pardonable than the means we use to conceal them.` Francois de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680), Maxims `We only acknowledge small faults in order to make it appear that we are free from great ones.` Francois de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680) `Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him.` Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) `modesty, n.: Being comfortable that others will discover your greatness.` Unknown `When the price of harmony with others becomes the surrender of our mind, an autonomous individual chooses not to pay it.` Nathaniel Branden (b.1930), `Honoring the Self` `I'd rather make the gravest of mistakes than surrender my own judgment.` James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) as Cora in The Last of the Mohicans `An error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982) `Faith in oneself is the best and safest course.` Michelangelo (1475-1564) `Consider the reasons which make us certain that we are right but not the fact that we are certain. If you are not convinced, ignore our certainty. Don't be tempted to substitute our judgment for your own.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982) as Hugh Akston, Atlas Shrugged `None of the moral virtues arises in us by nature; for nothing that exists by nature can form a habit contrary to its nature. For instance the stone which by nature moves downwards cannot be habituated to move upwards, not even if one tries to train it by throwing it up ten thousand times; nor can fire be habituated to move downwards, nor can anything else that by nature behaves in one way be trained to behave in another. Neither by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do the virtues arise in us; rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit.` Aristotle (384BC-322BC) `Habit is a cable; we weave a thread of it each day, and at last we cannot break it.` Horace Mann (1796-1859) `Man has to learn to become what he is supposed to be.` Eric Hoffer (1902-1983) `Every man who observes vigilantly and resolves steadfastly grows unconsciously into genius.` Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) `It is by doing just acts that the just man is produced, and by doing temperate acts the temperate man; without doing these no one would have even a prospect of becoming good. But most people do not do these, but take refuge in theory and think they are being philosophers and will become good in this way, behaving somewhat like patients who listen attentively to their doctors, but do none of the things they are ordered to do. As the latter will not be made well in body by such a course of treatment, the former will not be made well in soul by such a course of philosophy.` Aristotle (384BC-322BC), Nicomachean Ethics `Only the ideas we actually live are of any value.` Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) `The purpose of knowledge is action.` Val Kornea (b.1979) `Philosophy is a vehicle--in order to have traction it must have contact with the ground, else it's just spinning its wheels.` Val Kornea (b.1979) `The best man is he who most tries to perfect himself, and the happiest man is he who most feels that he is perfecting himself.` Socrates `Of any achievements open to you, the one that makes all others possible is the creation of your own character.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Atlas Shrugged `He who stops being better stops being good.` Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) `No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.` Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) `Character is the accumulated confidence that individual men and women acquire from years of doing the right thing, over and over again, even when they don't feel like it. People with character understand that their lives are filled with events and choices that are significant, above all, not because of the short term success or failure of the search for money or position, but because the choices we make are actually making us into one kind of person, or another.` Alan Keyes (b.1950) `Life can be pulled by goals just as surely as it can be pushed by drives.` Viktor E. Frankl `A man far oftener appears to have a decided character from persistently following his temperament than from persistently following his principles.` Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Human, All Too Human `Everybody's a self-made man; but only the successful ones are ever willing to admit it.` Unknown `It's easier to act your way into a feeling than it is to feel your way into an action.` C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) `If one is to love oneself one must behave in ways that one can admire.` Irvin Yalom `A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.` Mark Twain (1835-1910) `My self-esteem is more valuable than any short-term rewards for its betrayal.` Nathaniel Branden (b.1930), The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem `The enormous majority of citizens are honest without any regard whatever to the threats of the law. The real punishment of normal man is the loss of the consciousness of that individual power and greatness which are the sources of his inner life.` Maria Montessori (1870-1952), The Montessori Method. Schocken Books. 1964. 26 `Good men hate to sin out of their love of virtue.` Roman proverb `If a good person does you wrong, act as though you had not noticed it. They will make note of this and not remain in your debt long.` Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) `Self-esteem is the reputation you get with yourself.` Nathaniel Branden (b.1930) `Conscience warns us as a friend before it punishes as a judge.` Stanislaus Leszczynski (1677-1766) `You must never lower yourself to being a person you don't like.` Henry Rollins (b.1961) `Man is a being of self-made soul.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Atlas Shrugged `Hell--and heaven--and purgatory--is living with yourself.` Val Kornea (b.1979) `Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.` Mark Twain (1835-1910) `Rather fail with honor than succeed by fraud.` Sophocles (5th Century BC) `The proud man does not demand of himself the impossible, but he does demand every ounce of the possible. He refuses to rest content with a defective soul, shrugging in self-deprecation "That's me". He knows that that "me" was created, and is alterable, by him.` Leonard Peikoff (b.1933) `In man creator and creature are united. Your pity is for the "creature in man", for that which must be formed, broken, forged, torn, burned, and purged--for that which necessarily must and shall suffer. And our pity--do you not grasp for whom our converse pity is, when it protests against your pity as against the worst of all pamperings and weaknesses?` Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) `The pitying one rarely understands the "whole inner sequence" and the "entire economy of the soul": "he wants to help and does not realize that there is a personal necessity of suffering".` Walter Kaufmann explaining Nietzsche's thoughts, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist `Suffering as such is not a value; only man's fight against suffering is.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Atlas Shrugged `When I was a boy of seven or eight I read a novel untitled "Abafi" -- The Son of Aba -- a Serbian translation from the Hungarian of Josika, a writer of renown. The lessons it teaches are much like those of "Ben Hur," and in this respect it might be viewed as anticipatory of the work of Wallace. The possibilities of will-power and self-control appealed tremendously to my vivid imagination, and I began to discipline myself. Had I a sweet cake or a juicy apple which I was dying to eat I would give it to another boy and go through the tortures of Tantalus, pained but satisfied. Had I some difficult task before me which was exhausting I would attack it again and again until it was done. So I practiced day by day from morning till night. At first it called for a vigorous mental effort directed against disposition and desire, but as years went by the conflict lessened and finally my will and wish became identical. They are so to-day, and in this lies the secret of whatever success I have achieved.` Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), "How Cosmic Forces Shape Our Destinies" `At first my resolutions faded like snow in April, but in a little while I conquered my weakness and felt a pleasure I never knew before - that of doing as I willed.` Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) `The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in hardness against themselves and others, in experiments. Their joy is self-conquest. Difficult tasks are a privilege to them; to play with burdens that crush others, a recreation. They are the most venerable kind of man: that does not preclude their being the most cheerful and the kindliest.` Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) `The relaxed mind cannot lead a severe life.` Victor Hugo (1802-1885), Les Miserables `For once to pose questions here with a hammer and perhaps to hear as a reply that famous hollow sound... what a delight for one who has ears behind his ears.` Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) `Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems.` Rene Descartes (1596-1650), Discourse on Method `You seek problems because you need their gifts.` Richard Bach (b.1936) `I don't have a solution but I certainly admire the problem.` Ashleigh Brilliant `Whoever thinks much and to good purpose easily forgets his own experiences, but not the thoughts which these experiences have called forth.` Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) `In the field of observation, chance favors the prepared mind.` Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) `The essence of genius is to know what to overlook.` William James (1842-1910) `When choosing between two evils I always like to take the one I've never tried before.` Mae West (1893-1980) `Err on the side of curiosity.` Val Kornea (b.1979) `Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.` T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) `An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.` Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) `Beware of dissipating your powers; strive constantly to concentrate them. Genius thinks it can do whatever it sees others doing, but is sure to repent of every ill-judged outlay.` Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) `If you chase two rabbits, you will lose them both` Native American Saying, Civilization IV `You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks.` Winston Churchill (1874-1965) `Thinking is a momentary dismissal of irrelevancies.` Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) `When you write down your ideas you automatically focus your full attention on them. Few if any of us can write one thought and think another at the same time. Thus a pencil and paper make excellent concentration tools.` Michael Leboeuf `The quest for reason is for the noncontradictory integration of experience.` Nathaniel Branden (b.1930) `The first thing that intellect does with an object is to class it with something else.` William James (1842-1910) `Integration is the essential part of understanding.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), The Return of the Primitive `Suppose Alfred justifiably believed the proposition "p", and justifiably believed "if p, then q". He also believes "q". Is he justified in doing so? A Justified True Belief-er would quickly say yes - it's classic Modus Ponens. But what if Alfred didn't believe in "q" for this deductive reason? What if he believed in "q" because he liked the sound of it, or it was a comforting thought to him, unaware that it was also logically demanded by his other beliefs? This is not knowledge; it is merely a lucky accident.` Ranald Clouston `Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is not more a science than a heap of stones is a home.` Henri Poincare (1854-1912) `A fact never went into partnership with a miracle. Truth scorns the assistance of wonders. A fact will fit every other fact in the universe, and that is how you can tell whether it is or is not a fact. A lie will not fit anything except another lie.` Robert Ingersoll `The grand aim of all science is to cover the greatest number of empirical facts by logical deduction from the smallest number of hypotheses or axioms.` Albert Einstein (1879-1955), Life Magazine `The only justification for our concepts and systems of concepts is that they serve to represent the complex of our experiences; beyond this they have no legitimacy.` Albert Einstein (1879-1955) `Schematization and classification per se have no cognitive value. The scientific significance of a concept arises out of its function in the theories to which it belongs; outside the context of these theories it is no more than intellectual plaything.` Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), Socialism `Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.` James Arthur Baldwin (1924-1987) `Don't worry that children never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you.` Robert Fulghum (b.1933) `I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.` John Locke (1632-1704) `Actions are in the class of particulars.` Aristotle (384BC-322BC), Nicomachean Ethics `If you do it, you will have done it.` Val Kornea (b.1979) `Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.` Victor Hugo (1802-1885) `Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the time. Vision with action can change the world.` Joel Barker `The more often a man feels without acting, the less he'll be able to act. And in the long run, the less he'll be able to feel.` C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) `Men weary as much of not doing the things they want to do as of doing the things they do not want to do.` Eric Hoffer (1902-1983) `It is not in the nature of man--nor of any living entity--to start out by giving up, by spitting in one's own face and damning existence; that requires a process of corruption whose rapidity differs from man to man. Some give up at the first touch of pressure; some sell out; some run down by imperceptible degrees and lose their fire, never knowing when or how they lost it. Yet a few hold on and move on, knowing that the fire is not to be betrayed.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Introduction to The Fountainhead `A chronic lack of pleasure, of any enjoyable, rewarding or stimulating experiences, produces a slow, gradual, day-by-day erosion of man's emotional vitality, which he may ignore or repress, but which is recorded by the relentless computer of his subconscious mechanism that registers an ebbing flow, then a trickle, then a few last drops of fuel--until the day when his inner motor stops and he wonders desperately why he has no desire to go on, unable to find any definable cause of his hopeless, chronic sense of exhaustion.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), The Voice of Reason `Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won. It exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982) `Anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), The Romantic Manifesto `The generality of mankind seek their own good and hold that this is their proper business.` Aristotle (384BC-322BC), Nicomachean Ethics `Each man is the best judge of his own interest.` John Adams `Philosophical reflection shows that acting on certain principles is the prerequisite of achieving any goal, but that doesn't mean that you and your life are subordinate to those principles.` Harry Binswanger (b.1944), HBL `It is absurd to hold that a man ought to be ashamed of being unable to defend himself with his limbs, but not of being unable to defend himself with speech and reason, when the use of rational speech is more distinctive of a human being than the use of his limbs.` Aristotle (384BC-322BC) `In a republican nation whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance.` Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) `Reason obeys itself; and ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.` Thomas Paine (1737-1809) `All sentient beings are created unequal. The best society provides each with equal opportunity to float at his own level.` Frank Herbert (1920-1986), The Dosadi Experiment `While all men may be created equal, it is obvious that they do not remain that way.` David Dyer `The good man ought to be a lover of self, since he will then act nobly, and so benefit himself and aid his fellows; but the bad man ought not to be a lover of self, since he will follow his base passions, and so injure both himself and his neighbors. For the wicked man, what he does clashes with what he ought to do, but what the good man ought to do he does; for reason in each of its possessors chooses what is best for itself, and the good man obeys his reason.` Aristotle (384BC-322BC) `Aristotle may be regarded as the cultural barometer of Western history. Whenever his influence dominated the scene, it paved the way for one of history's brilliant eras; whenever it fell, so did mankind.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982) `A rational pride in oneself and in one's moral character is, when it is earned, the crown of the virtues.` Aristotle (384BC-322BC) `Pride is the emotional reward of achievement. It is not a vice to be overcome but a virtue to be attained.` Nathaniel Branden (b.1930), The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem `The noble soul has reverence for itself.` Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) `Virtue would not go far did not vanity escort her.` Francois de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680), Reflexions and Moral Maxims (1678) `The proof of an achieved self-esteem is your soul's shudder of contempt and rebellion against the role of a sacrificial animal, against the vile impertinence of any creed that proposes to immolate the irreplaceable value which is your consciousness and the incomparable glory which is your existence.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Atlas Shrugged `From now until the end of time no one else will ever see life with my eyes.` Christopher Morley (1890-1957) `Who can tell me why I should live for anything but for that which I want?` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), We the Living `It is not a sacrifice to give your life for others, if death is your personal desire. To achieve the virtue of sacrifice, you must want to live, you must love it, you must burn with passion for this earth and for all the splendor it can give you--you must feel the twist of every knife as it slashes your desires away from your reach and drains your love out of your body.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Atlas Shrugged `If it were true that men could achieve their good by means of turning some men into sacrificial animals, and I were asked to immolate myself for the sake of creatures who wanted to survive at the price of my blood, if I were asked to serve the interests of society apart from, above and against my own--I would refuse, I would reject it as the most contemptible evil, I would fight it with every power I possess, I would fight the whole of mankind, if one minute were all I could last before I were murdered, I would fight in the full confidence of the justice of my battle and of a living being's right to exist.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982) as Hank Rearden in Atlas Shrugged `I do not recognize anyone's right to one minute of my life, nor to any part of my energy, nor to any achievement of mine, no matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), The Fountainhead `If it is now the belief of my fellow men, who call themselves the public, that their good requires victims, then I say: The public good be damned, I will have no part of it!` Ayn Rand (1905-1982) as Hank Rearden in Atlas Shrugged `I swear by my life and my love for it that I will never live for the sake of another man or ask another man to live for mine.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Atlas Shrugged `If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains set lightly upon you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.` Samuel Adams (1722-1803) `Freedom hath a thousand charms to show, That slaves, however contented, never know.` William Cowper `Freedom is a heavy load. A great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy, it is not a gift given, but a choice made.` Victor Hugo (1802-1885) `Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden. Of what avail is freedom to choose if the self be ineffectual? We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, "to be free from freedom." It was not sheer hypocrisy when the rank-and-file Nazis declared themselves not guilty of all the enormities they had committed. They considered themselves cheated and maligned when made to shoulder responsibility for obeying orders. Had they not joined the Nazi movement in order to be free from responsibility?` Eric Hoffer (1902-1983), The True Believer `The consuming desire of some human beings is to deliberately plant their whole life in the hands of some other person.` Quentin Crisp (1908-1999), paraphrased `There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement. For an achievement does not settle anything permanently. We still have to prove our worth anew each day: we have to prove that we are as good today as we were yesterday. But when we have a valid alibi for not achieving anything we are fixed, so to speak, for life. Moreover, when we have an alibi for not writing a book, painting a picture, and so on, we have an alibi for not writing the greatest book and not painting the greatest picture.` Eric Hoffer (1902-1983) `Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.` James Baldwin `We are more often treacherous through weakness than through calculation.` Francois de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680) `Cunning and treachery are the offspring of incapacity.` Francois de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680) `The weak are the most treacherous of us all. They come to the strong and drain them. They are bottomless. They are insatiable. They are always parched and always bitter. They are everyone's concern and like vampires they suck our life's blood.` Bette Davis (1908-1989) `Evil is the cure for incompetence.` Scott Adams (b.1957) `Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.` Isaac Asimov (1920-1992), Foundation `Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity.` Nick Diamos `Most people are far too much occupied with themselves to be malicious.` Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) `Men are not against you; they are merely for themselves.` Gene Fowler `To suppose that the eye [...] could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory.` Charles Darwin (1809-1882) `In questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.` Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) `The passage of time has revealed to everyone the truths that I previously set forth; and, together with the truth of the facts, there has come to light the great difference in attitude between those who simply and dispassionately refused to admit the discoveries to be true, and those who combined with their incredulity some reckless passion of their own. Men who were well grounded in astronomical and physical science were persuaded as soon as they received my first message. There were others who denied them or remained in doubt only because of their novel and unexpected character, and because they had not yet had the opportunity to see for themselves. These men have by degrees come to be satisfied. But some, besides allegiance to their original error, possess I know not what fanciful interest in remaining hostile not so much toward the things in question as toward their discoverer. No longer being able to deny them, these men now take refuge in obstinate silence, but being more than ever exasperated by that which has pacified and quieted other men, they divert their thoughts to other fancies and seek new ways to damage me.` Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) `I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.` Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) `Definition of tragedy: A hero destroyed by the excess of his virtues.` Aristotle (384BC-322BC) `There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, then to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new.` Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince `Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices, but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence and fulfills the duty to express the results of his thought in clear form.` Albert Einstein (1879-1955) `Spiritual movements are revolts of thought against inertia, of the few against the many; of those who because they are strong in spirit are strongest alone against those who can express themselves only in the mass and the mob, and who are significant only because they are numerous.` Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), Socialism `Some people admire men and women of integrity; others are made nervous--they experience an unspoken sense of reproach.` Nathaniel Branden (b.1930) `A sure sign of a genius is that all of the dunces are in a confederacy against him.` Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) `The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.` John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) `If the average man is made in God's image, then a man such as Beethoven or Aristotle is plainly superior to God, and so God may be jealous of him, and eager to see his superiority perish with his bodily frame.` H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) `What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself. There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven.` Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) `We owe science to the combined energies of individual men of genius, rather than to any tendency to progress inherent in civilization.` Chauncey Wright (1830-1875) `If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.` Isaac Newton (1642-1727) `There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.` Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) `Love truth, but pardon error.` Voltaire (1694-1778) `Those were steps for me, and I have climbed up over them: to that end I had to pass over them. Yet they thought that I wanted to retire on them.` Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) `One is always a long way from solving a problem until one actually has the answer.` Stephen Hawking (b.1942) `Most of my advances were by mistake. You uncover what is when you get rid of what isn't.` Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) `I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.` Thomas Edison (1847-1931) `He that can have patience can have what he will.` Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) `Life is a perpetual instruction in cause and effect.` Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) `It is not enough for a man to know how to ride; he must know how to fall.` Mexican Proverb `To fail is a natural consequence of trying. To succeed takes time and prolonged effort in the face of unfriendly odds. To think it will be any other way, no matter what you do, is to invite yourself to be hurt and to limit your enthusiasm for trying again.` David Viscott (1938-1996) `The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.` Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915) `A man flattened by an opponent can get up again. A man flattened by conformity stays down for good.` Thomas John Watson, Sr (1874-1956) `Failure is not the falling down, but the staying down.` Mary Pickford (1893-1979) `You haven't failed until you give up.` Unknown `Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.` Henry Ford (1863-1947) `Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.` Winston Churchill (1874-1965) `The road to success is dotted with many tempting parking places.` Unknown `Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.` Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) `Mountains cannot be surmounted except by winding paths.` Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) `There is no road too long to the man who advances deliberately and without undue haste.` Jean de la Bruyere `If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been owing more to patient attention, than to any other talent.` Isaac Newton (1642-1727) `If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all.` Michelangelo (1475-1564) `A remarkable, glorious achievement is just what a long series of unremarkable, unglorious tasks looks like from far away.` Tim Urban `It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer.` Albert Einstein (1879-1955) `Genius is eternal patience.` Michelangelo (1475-1564) `Life is to be lived. If you have to support yourself, you had bloody well better find some way that is going to be interesting.` Katharine Hepburn (1907-2003) `The man who does not work for the love of work but only for money is not likely to make money nor find much fun in life.` Charles M. Schwab (1862-1939) `Only he is successful in his business who makes that pursuit which affords him the highest pleasure sustain him.` Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) `Before you can do things for people, you must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the secondary consequences. The work, not the people.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), The Fountainhead `You have to be good at something.` Val Kornea (b.1979) `You find meaning in the self-directed achievement of that which you have affirmed as good or important.` Peter Saint-Andre `Invent your own job; take such an interest in it that you eat, sleep, dream, walk, talk, and live nothing but your work until you succeed.` Walt Disney (1901-1966) `Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded--here and there, now and then--are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.` Robert Anson Heinlein (1907-1988), Time Enough for Love `If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.` Henry Ford (1863-1947) `I've never really viewed myself as particularly talented. I've viewed myself as slightly above average in talent. And where I excel is ridiculous, sickening, work ethic. You know, while the other guy's sleeping? I'm working. While the other guy's eating? I'm working.` Will Smith (b.1968) `The heights by great men reached and kept, were not obtained by sudden flight. But they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night.` Henry Wadsworth Longfellow `He who enjoys doing and enjoys what he has done is happy.` Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) `Look at a day when you are supremely satisfied at the end. It's not a day when you lounge around doing nothing; it's when you've had everything to do, and you've done it.` Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013) `Relaxation is attractive only in those for whom it is an unnatural state.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), The Fountainhead `There's nothing of any importance in life--except how well you do your work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are, will come from that. It's the only measure of human value. All the codes of ethics they'll try to ram down your throat are just so much paper money put out by swindlers to fleece people of their virtues. The code of competence is the only system of morality that's on a gold standard.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982) as Francisco D'Anconia, Atlas Shrugged `Half of life is work.` Val Kornea (b.1979) `Your real security is yourself. You know you can do it, and they can't ever take that away from you.` Mae West (1893-1980) `Why had she always felt that joyous sense of confidence when looking at machines?--she thought. In these giant shapes, two aspects pertaining to the inhuman were radiantly absent: the causeless and the purposeless. Every part of the motors was an embodied answer to "Why?" and "What for?"--like the steps of a life-course chosen by the sort of mind she worshipped. The motors were a moral code cast in steel.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982) as Dagny Taggart, Atlas Shrugged `The harder you work, the harder it is to surrender.` Vince Lombardi (1913-1970) `Creative work is an affirmation of life.` Val Kornea (b.1979) `The death of endeavor is the birth of disgust.` Ambrose Bierce (1842-1913), The Devil's Dictionary `All is disgust when one leaves his own nature and does things that misfit it.` Sophocles (5th Century BC) `Every man is proud of what he does well; and no man is proud of what he does not do well. With the former, his heart is in his work; and he will do twice as much of it with less fatigue. The latter performs a little imperfectly, looks at it in disgust, turns from it, and imagines himself exceedingly tired. The little he has done, comes to nothing, for want of finishing.` Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) `There is nothing so easy but that it becomes difficult when you do it reluctantly.` Publius Terentius Afer (Terence) `When we see ourselves in a situation which must be endured and gone through, it is best to make up our minds to it. Meet it with firmness, and accommodate everything to it in the best way practicable. This lessens the evil, while fretting and fuming only serves to increase our own torment.` Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) `If you can't get out of it, get into it.` Unknown `A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.` Lao Tzu `He has half the deed done who has made a beginning.` Horace (65-8 BC) `A year from now you may wish you had started today.` Karen Lamb `There are many laters but only one now.` Bill Brent (1960-2012) `What can be done at any time is never done at all.` English Proverb `One thing at a time. Most important thing first. Start now.` Unknown `Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.` Albert Camus (1913-1960) `The best way of starting a day is by living the previous one well.` Val Kornea (b.1979) `I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can do.` Edward Everett Hale (1822-1909) `It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.` H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) `I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.` Joseph Baretti `A thief believes everybody steals.` Unknown `He who accuses all of mankind convicts only one.` Edmund Burke (1729-1797) `Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack.` George Patton (1885-1945) `You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.` Eric Hoffer (1902-1983) `Pay attention to your enemies, for they are the first to discover your mistakes.` Antisthenes `Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.` Jonathan Kozol `Blind aggressiveness would destroy the attack itself, not the defense.` Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831) `Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.` Sun Tzu (544–496 BC), The Art of War `The good fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, and then waited for an opportunity of defeating the enemy.` Sun Tzu (544–496 BC), The Art of War `A pint of sweat saves a gallon of blood.` George S. Patton (1885-1945) `Announcing your plans is a good way to hear God laugh.` Al Swearengen in Deadwood `No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.` Helmuth von Moltke the Elder (1800-1891) `In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.` Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969) `Leaders must be close enough to relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them.` John Maxwell `If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.` Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1900-1944) `A good scare is worth more than good advice.` Horace (65-8 BC) `Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.` Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969) `He that fears you present will hate you absent.` Unknown `Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy.` Howard W. Newton `Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.` Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) `To give a reason for anything is to breed a doubt of it.` William Hazlitt `Virtue debases itself in justifying itself.` Voltaire (1694-1778) `Nine times out of ten, the first thing a man's companion knows of his shortcomings is from his apology.` Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr (1809-1894) `People will take you at your own reckoning.` Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) `I wish you would raise yourself up before me, not that you make yourself still smaller. How am I to forgive you if I do not first rediscover in you the character for whose sake one can forgive you!` Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) `When he has said that, his disciple shouted...: "But I believe in your cause and consider it so strong that I shall say everything, everything that I can find in my heart to say against it." The innovator laughed...: "This kind of discipleship," he said then, "is the best".` Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) `We do not want to be spared by our best enemies, nor by those we love thoroughly.` Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) `One repays a teacher badly if one always remains a pupil only.` Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) `An enemy will agree, but a friend will argue.` Russian Proverb `When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.` Thomas Sowell (b.1930) `I've always demanded a certain quality in the people I liked. I've always recognized it at once--and it's the only quality I respect in men. I chose my friends by that. Now I know what it is. A self-sufficient ego. Nothing else matters.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), The Fountainhead `A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud.` Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) `Friends are lost by calling often and calling seldom.` Scottish proverb `If you have a right to respect, that means other people don't have a right to their own opinions.` Thomas Sowell (b.1930) `He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.` Thomas Paine (1737-1809) `Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as a heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors.` Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) `Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.` Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968) `Those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war.` Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968) `Weakness is the surest path to conflict.` President Donald Trump, 12/18/2017, https://youtu.be/qhptjA85IMg?t=1344 `All it takes for evil to thrive is for good men and women to do nothing.` Police Recruitment Billboard `The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.` Albert Einstein (1879-1955) `No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.` Stanislaw Jerzy Lee `In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.` Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968) `It is not justice or equal treatment that you grant to men when you abstain equally from praising men's virtues and from condemning men's vices. When your impartial attitude declares, in effect, that neither the good nor the evil may expect anything from you--whom do you betray and whom do you encourage?` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), The Virtue of Selfishness `Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.` Adam Smith (1723-1790) `Pity for the guilty is treason to the innocent.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), The Romantic Manifesto `To withhold your contempt from men's vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982) `The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982) `Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.` Barry Goldwater (1909-1998) `In the field of morality, compromise is surrender to evil.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal `Compromise is always only a momentary lull in the fight between the two principles, not the result of logical thinking-out of the problem.` Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), Socialism `When brute force is on the march, compromise is the red carpet.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), The Return of the Primitive `The difference between zero and one is that of principle; the difference between one and two is arbitrary.` Val Kornea (b.1979) `An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile--hoping it will eat him last.` Winston Churchill (1874-1965) `All the reasons which made the *initiation* of physical force evil, make the *retaliatory* use of physical force a moral imperative.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982) `The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.` H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) `In the transition to statism, every infringement of human rights has begun with the suppression of a given right's least attractive practitioners.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Philosophy: Who Needs It `They came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. And then they came for me and by that time no one was left to speak up.` Daniel B. Baker, Political Quotations ed. Rev. Martin Niemoeller, a Protestant minister in Nazi Germany, in 1945 `A man is not paid for having a head and hands, but for using them.` Elbert Hubbard `Nature does not grant anyone an innate title of "consumer"; it is a title that has to be earned--by production.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Philosophy: Who Needs It `For every new mouth to feed, there are two hands to produce.` Peter T. Bauer `Appetite, n. An instinct thoughtfully implanted by Providence as a solution to the labor question.` Ambrose Bierce (1842-1913), The Devil's Dictionary `Gain may be temporary and uncertain; but ever while you live, expense is constant and certain.` Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) `You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.` Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) `Immortality costs infinity dollars.` Paul Siraisi `Of all the statist violations of individual rights in a mixed economy, the military draft is the worst. It is an abrogation of rights. It negates man's fundamental right--the right to life--and establishes the fundamental principle of statism: that a man's life belongs to the state, and the state may claim it by compelling him to sacrifice it in battle. If the state may force a man to risk death or hideous maiming and crippling, in a war declared at the state's discretion, for a cause he may neither approve of nor even understand, if his consent is not required to send him into unspeakable martyrdom--then, in principle, all rights are negated in that state, and its government is not man's protector any longer. What is there left to protect?` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal `[John Nash's] fear of being drafted remained acute long after the Korean War ended and after he turned twenty-six (the age cut-off for draft eligibility). It eventually reached delusional proportions and helped drive him to attempt to abandon his American citizenship and seek political asylum abroad. [...] Interestingly, Nash's gut instinct has since been validated by schizophrenia researchers. None of the life events known to produce mental disorders such as depression or anxiety neurosis--combat, death of a loved one, divorce, loss of job--have ever been convincingly implicated in the onset of schizophrenia. But several studies have since shown that basic military training during peacetime can precipitate schizophrenia in men with a hitherto unsuspected vulnerability to the illness. Although the study subjects were all carefully screened for mental illness, hospitalization rates for schizophrenia turned out to be abnormally high, especially for draftees.` Sylvia Nasar (b.1947), A Beautiful Mind `The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he is on.` Joseph Heller (1923-1999), Catch 22 `We cannot fight against collectivism, unless we fight against its moral base: altruism. We cannot fight against altruism, unless we fight against its epistemological base: irrationalism. We cannot fight against anything, unless we fight for something--and what we must fight for is the supremacy of reason and a view of man as a rational being.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982) `It is futile to fight against, if one does not know what one is fighting for.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal `The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.` Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) `The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next.` fortune cookie `The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), The Return of the Primitive `Every absurdity has a champion to defend it.` Oliver Goldsmith (1730-1774) `In a civilized country when ridicule fails to kill a movement it begins to command respect.` Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) `Without knowledge of history, the way things are now seems inevitable.` Walter J. Ong, Orality & Literacy `The history of mankind is the history of ideas. For it is ideas, theories and doctrines that guide human action, determine the ultimate ends men aim at, and the choice of the means employed for the attainment of these ends. The sensational events which stir the emotions and catch the interest of superficial observers are merely the consummation of ideological changes. There are no such things as abrupt sweeping transformations of human affairs. What is called, in rather misleading terms, a "turning point in history" is the coming on the scene of forces which were already for a long time at work behind the scene. New ideologies, which had already long since superseded the old ones, throw off their last veil and even the dullest people become aware of the changes which they did not notice before.` Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), Socialism `History does not move by leaps into unrelated novelty, but rather by the selective emphasis of aspects of its own immediate past.` Julian Jaynes (1920-1997), The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind `When conditions are right, a country can move rapidly: A policy seen as revolutionary becomes "innovative," then "familiar," then something "we've always done."` Leonard Peikoff (b.1933), The DIM Hypothesis `The worst thing that can happen to a good cause is not to be skillfully attacked, but to be ineptly defended.` Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) `There's nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view that I hold dear.` Daniel C. Dennett (b.1942) `Oh how sweet it is to hear one's own convictions from another's lips.` Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) `When an opponent declares "I will not come over to your side," I calmly say "Your child belongs to us already... What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community."` Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) `It's no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.` Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986) `It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.` Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) `The victor will never be asked if he told the truth.` Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) `Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.` George Orwell (1903-1950), "1984" `The people of every country are the only safe guardians of their own rights, and are the only instruments which can be used for their destruction.` Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), 1809 letter to John Wyche `There is nothing to take a man's freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982) `If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose--because it contains all the others--the fact that they were the people who created the phrase "to make money." No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity--to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words "to make money" hold the essence of human morality.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Atlas Shrugged `Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), For the New Intellectual `Every form of happiness is private. Our greatest moments are personal, self-motivated, not to be touched.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982) `Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.` Albert Einstein (1879-1955) `Liberty is not the means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.` Lord Acton `Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas.` Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) `Our liberty depends on freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.` Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) `If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.` Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) `The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of debate.` Noam Chomsky (b.1928) `When we confine our debates to the merits or demerits of particular executive orders, we are tacitly accepting arbitrary rule.` Thomas Sowell (b.1930) `If you get people asking the wrong questions, you don't have to worry about the answers.` Hunter Thompson `The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.` Steve Biko (1946-1977) `I freed thousands of slaves. I could have freed thousands more, if they had known they were slaves.` Falsely attributed to Harriet Tubman `None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free.` Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) `Find out just what the people will submit to and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.` Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) `People must believe they’re entitled to be free, if they’re to remain free.` Michael J. Hurd, Ph.D. `If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.` Frank Herbert (1920-1986), The Dosadi Experiment `If you don't control your mind, someone else will.` John Allston `Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.` Voltaire (1694-1778) `Men never do evil so fully and so happily as when they do it for conscience's sake.` Pascal `Any violence which does not spring from a spiritual base, will be wavering and uncertain. It lacks the stability which can only rest in a fanatical outlook.` Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), Mein Kampf `When loyalty to an unyielding purpose is dropped by the virtuous, it's picked up by scoundrels--and you get the indecent spectacle of a cringing, bargaining, traitorous good and a self-righteously uncompromising evil.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982) `Beware of altruism. It is based on self-deception, the root of all evil.` Robert Anson Heinlein (1907-1988), Time Enough for Love `The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.` H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) `The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience.` Albert Camus (1913-1960) `Since there is no such entity as "the public," since the public is merely a number of individuals, any claimed or implied conflict of "the public interest" with private interests means that the interests of some men are to be sacrificed to the interests and wishes of others. Since the concept is so conveniently undefinable, its use rests only on any given gang's ability to proclaim that "The public, c'est moi"--and to maintain the claim at the point of a gun.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982) `It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation; that the position of the individual ego is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole..., that above all the unity of a nation's spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual... This state of mind, which subordinates the interests of the ego to the conservation of the community, is really the first premise for every truly human culture... The basic attitude from which such activity arises, we call--to distinguish it from egoism and selfishness--idealism. By this we understand only the individual's capacity to make sacrifices for the community, for his fellow men.` Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), explaining the moral philosophy of Nazism `Don't bother to examine a folly--ask yourself only what it accomplishes.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), The Fountainhead `It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there is service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be master.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), The Fountainhead `The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep.` Eric Hoffer (1902-1983) `Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms.` Robert Anson Heinlein (1907-1988), Starship Troopers `If the history of animals were recorded, the most ferocious species would not equal the carnage perpetrated by man when they choose force as their means of dealing with one another.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982) `Force is all-conquering, but its victories are short-lived.` Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) `Collectivism has lost the two crucial weapons that raised it to world power and made all of its victories possible: intellectuality and idealism, or reason and morality. It had to lose them precisely at the height of its success, since its claim to both was a fraud: the full, actual reality of socialist-communist-fascist states has demonstrated the brute irrationality of collectivist systems and the inhumanity of altruism as a moral code.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), The Cashing-In: The Student "Rebellion" `No social system can stand for long without a moral base. Project a magnificent skyscraper being built on quicksands: while men are struggling upward to add the hundredth and two-hundredth stories, the tenth and twentieth are vanishing, sucked under by the muck. That it the history of capitalism, of its swaying, tottering attempt to stand erect on the foundation of the altruist morality.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal `You fear the man who has a dollar less than you, that dollar is rightfully his, he makes you feel like a moral defrauder. You hate the man who has a dollar more than you, that dollar is rightfully yours, he makes you feel that you are morally defrauded. The man below is a source of your guilt, the man above is a source of your frustration. You do not know what to surrender or demand, when to give and when to grab, what pleasure in life is rightfully yours and what debt is still unpaid to others--you struggle to evade, as "theory," the knowledge that by the moral standard you've accepted you are guilty every moment of your life, there is no mouthful of food you swallow that is not needed by someone somewhere on earth--and you give up the problem in blind resentment, you conclude that moral perfection is not to be achieved or desired, that you will muddle through by snatching as snatch can and by avoiding the eyes of the young, of those who look at you as if self-esteem were possible and they expected you to have it. Guilt is all that you retain within your soul--and so does every other man, as he goes past, avoiding your eyes. Do you wonder why your morality has not achieved brotherhood on earth or the good will of man to man?` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Atlas Shrugged `Men who accept as an ideal an irrational goal which they cannot achieve, never lift their heads thereafter--and never discover that their bowed heads were the only goal to be achieved.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal `Guilt is a rope that wears thin.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Atlas Shrugged `That which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Atlas Shrugged `No weird cultural aberration produced Nazism. No intellectual lunatic fringe miraculously overwhelmed a civilized country. It is modern philosophy--not some peripheral aspect of it, but the most central of its mainstreams--which turned the Germans into a nation of killers. The land of poets and philosophers was brought down by its poets and philosophers.` Leonard Peikoff (b.1933), The Ominous Parallels `The choice is not self-sacrifice or domination. The choice is independence or dependence.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Atlas Shrugged `The free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country.` Milton Friedman (1912-2006), Capitalism and Freedom `Observe that in World War II, Germany and Russia dismantled entire factories in conquered countries, to ship them home--while the freest one of the "mixed economies", the semi-capitalistic United States, sent billions worth of lend-lease equipment, including entire factories, to its allies. Germany and Russia needed war; the United States did not and gained nothing. Yet it is capitalism that today's peace-lovers oppose and statism that they advocate--in the name of peace.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal `When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns--or dollars. Take your choice--there is no other--and your time is running out.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982) as Francisco D'Anconia, Atlas Shrugged `When individual rights are abrogated, there is no way to determine who is entitled to what; there is no way to determine the justice of anyone's claims, desires, or interests. The criterion, therefore, reverts to the tribal concept of: one's wishes are limited only by the power of one's gang. In order to survive under such a system, men have no choice but to fear, hate, and destroy one another; it is a system of underground plotting, of secret conspiracies, of deals, favors, betrayals, and sudden, bloody coups.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal `When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.` P. J. O'Rourke (b.1947) `One of the methods used by statists to destroy capitalism consists in establishing controls that tie a given industry hand and foot, making it unable to solve its problems, then declaring that freedom has failed and stronger controls are necessary.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), 1975 `Without the Soviet government, who would provide the bread?` Val Kornea (b.1979) `The man who produces while others dispose of his product is a slave.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal `Slavery: From each according to his ability; to each according to his need. Mixed Economy: From each according to how much we can get away with, to each according to how much we need to stay in power. Capitalism: Keep your earnings.` Val Kornea (b.1979) `One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.` Plato (424/423BC-348/347BC) `Just because you do not take an interest in politics, does not mean politics won't take an interest in you.` Pericles (c.495-429 BC) `I am interested in politics so that one day I will not have to be interested in politics.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982) `There are four boxes to be used in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury and ammo. Please use in that order.` Unknown `A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the Public Treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the Public Treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy always followed by dictatorship.` Often attributed to Alexander Fraser Tytler (1747-1813), The Decline and Fall of the Athenian Republic `If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy.` Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) `The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.` Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) `I promise to take money from the people who don't vote for me and give it to the people who do.` Scott Adams (b.1957) as Dogbert `A government with the policy to rob Peter to pay Paul can be assured of the support of Paul.` George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) `The failure to give to a man what had never belonged to him can hardly be described as "sacrificing his interests".` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), The Virtue of Selfishness `I think myself that we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.` Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), 1824 letter to William Ludlow `I want the people of America to be able to work less for the government and more for themselves. I want them to have the rewards of their own industry. This is the chief meaning of freedom.` Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933) `No society ever thrived because it had a large and growing class of parasites living off of those who produce.` Thomas Sowell (b.1930) `What more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow citizens--a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.` Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826): 1st Inaugural, 1801. ME 3:320 `See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. Then abolish that law without delay... No legal plunder; this is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, harmony and logic.` Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) `Place economy among the first and most important republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared.` Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), 1816 letter to William Plumer `There are two ways to conquer and enslave a nation. One is by the sword. The other is by debt.` John Adams `There's free cheese in a mousetrap.` Proverb `The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but under the name of liberalism they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without ever knowing how it happened.` Norman Thomas (1884-1968), six-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America `See, when the Government spends money, it creates jobs; whereas when the money is left in the hands of Taxpayers, God only knows what they do with it. Bake it into pies, probably. Anything to avoid creating jobs.` Dave Barry (b.1947) `The whole idea of our government is this: If enough people get together and act in concert, they can take something and not pay for it.` P. J. O'Rourke (b.1947) `Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal `What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is the beginning of the end of any nation.` Adrian Rogers (1931-2005) `The principle that the majority have a right to rule the minority, practically resolves all government into a mere contest between two bodies of men, as to which of them shall be masters, and which of them slaves.` Lysander Spooner (1808-1887) `Since there is no such thing as the right of some men to vote away the rights of others, and no such thing as the right of the government to seize the property of some men for the unearned benefit of others--the advocates and supporters of the welfare state are morally guilty of robbing their opponents, and the fact that the robbery is legalized makes it morally worse, not better. The victims do not have to add self-inflicted martyrdom to the injury done to them by others; they do not have to let the looters profit doubly, by letting them distribute the money exclusively to the parasites who clamored for it. Whenever the welfare-state laws offer them some small restitution, the victims should take it.` Ayn Rand, "The Question of Scholarships," The Objectivist, 1966-06-11 `There are people who think that plunder loses all its immorality as soon as it becomes legal. Personally, I cannot imagine a more alarming situation.` Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) `We have rights, as individuals, to give as much of our own money as we please to charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of public money.` David Crockett (1786-1836) `The freemen of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise and entangled the question in precedents. They saw all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle.` James Madison (1751-1836) `The said constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms.` Samuel Adams (1722-1803) `The conclusion is thus inescapable that the history, concept, and wording of the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, as well as its interpretation by every major commentator and court in the first half-century after its ratification, indicates that what is protected is an individual right of a private citizen to own and carry firearms in a peaceful manner.` Report of the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 97th Congress, Second Session (February 1982) `We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.` Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) `It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government.` Thomas Paine (1737-1809) `The usual road to slavery is that first they take away your guns, then they take away your property, then last of all they tell you to shut up and say you are enjoying it.` James A. Donald `Germans who wish to use firearms should join the SS or the SA - ordinary citizens don't need guns, as their having guns doesn't serve the State.` Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945) `The only thing that will deter a crazy person with a gun, is a sane person with better aim.` Rand Paul (b.1963) `History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty. So let's not have any native militia or native police. German troops alone will bear the sole responsibility for the maintenance of law and order.` Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) `The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.` Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) `The prospect of tyranny may not grab the headlines the way vivid stories of gun crime routinely do. But few saw the Third Reich coming until it was too late. The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed--where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.` Judge Alex Kozinski (b.1950) `False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils except destruction. The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. Can it be supposed that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, the most important of the code, will respect the less important and arbitrary ones, which can be violated with ease and impunity, and which, if strictly obeyed, would put an end to personal liberty... and subject innocent persons to all the vexations that the guilty alone ought to suffer? Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man. They ought to be designated as laws not preventive but fearful of crimes, produced by the tumultuous impression of a few isolated facts, and not by thoughtful consideration of the inconveniences and advantages of a universal decree.` Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794), On Crimes and Punishment `Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.` Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) `Good leaders being scarce, following yourself is allowed.` Unknown `The cure for 1984 is 1776.` Seen on slashdot `The government was set to protect man from criminals--and the Constitution was written to protect man from the government. The Bill of Rights was not directed against private citizens, but against the government--as an explicit declaration that individual rights supersede any public or social power.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism `The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.` The 10th Amendment `When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.` Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) `If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.` Louis Dembitz Brandeis (1856-1941) `What you cannot enforce, do not command.` Sophocles (5th Century BC) `Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.` Montesquieu (1689-1755) `I used often to go to America during Prohibition, and there was far more drunkenness there then than before.` Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) `The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this.` Albert Einstein (1879-1955), My First Impression of the U.S.A., 1921 `Instead of giving money to found colleges to promote learning, why don't they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as good as the Prohibition one did, why, in five years we would have the smartest race of people on earth.` Will Rogers (1879-1935) `Alcohol didn't cause the high crime rates of the '20s and '30s, Prohibition did. And drugs do not cause today's alarming crime rates, but drug prohibition does.` US District Judge James C. Paine, addressing the Federal Bar Association in Miami, November, 1991 `Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others, and no interference with their persons or property.` Lysander Spooner `Every friend of freedom must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence.` Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize-winning economist `America needs fewer laws, not more prisons.` James Bovard `Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed? ... We want them broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against... We're after power and we mean it. There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted--and you create a nation of law-breakers--and then you cash in on guilt.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982) as Dr. Floyd Ferris, Atlas Shrugged, 406 `I suppose every scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there; but no one else has ever read it, nor can he find it again.` Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) `Some books are to be tasted, others swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.` Francis Bacon (1561-1626) `No steel can pierce the human heart as chillingly as a period at the right moment.` Isaac Babel (1894-1940) `The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.` Mark Twain (1835-1910) `In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.` Mortimer J. Adler `Phrasing is like salt on scrambled eggs. It is plain if there is not enough, and if it can be noticed, there is too much.` Stevens Hewitt `That is the sort of nonsense up with which I refuse to put.` Attributed to Winston Churchill (1874-1965), after having been criticized for ending a sentence with a preposition. `When a diplomat says yes, he means "perhaps"; When he says perhaps, he means "no"; When he says no, he is not a diplomat. When a lady says no, she means "perhaps"; When she says perhaps, she means "yes"; When she says yes, she is not a lady.` Voltaire (1694-1778) `If you really want to communicate something, even if it's just an emotion or an attitude, let alone an idea, the least effective and least enjoyable way is directly. It only goes in about half an inch. But if you can get people to the point where they have to think a moment what it is you're getting at, and then discover it... the thrill of discovery goes right through the heart.` Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999) `The secret of being tiresome is to tell everything.` Voltaire (1694-1778) `True eloquence consists in saying all that is necessary, and nothing but what is necessary.` Francois de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680) `Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.` Antoine de Saint-Exupery `The author of this paper seems to suffer from the common practice of those in a hurry to finish their term papers that if they somehow ignore the elephant in the room that disproves their point they might end up getting partial credit for impressing people with how well they can tap dance around the elephant.` Slashdot user Jim McCoy `Academism results when the reasons for the rule change, but not the rule.` Igor Stravinsky `A difference that makes no difference is no difference.` Beverley Eyre `When I was a boy of fourteen my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learnt in seven years.` Mark Twain (1835-1910) `Our senses don't deceive us: our judgment does.` Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) `The people sensible enough to give good advice are usually sensible enough to give none.` Eden Phillpotts `Silence is the best resolve for him who distrusts himself.` Francois de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680) `From listening comes wisdom, and from speaking repentance.` Italian proverb `Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.` Unknown (unattributed in the The Train, Volume 1, 1856); subsequently attributed to G. A. Sala (probably incorrectly, he is credited with having written something else in The Train); Dorothy Nevill published the quote as if original in 1910 in "Under Five Reigns" and people started attributing the quotation to her; it is attributed to Benjamin Franklin as far back as 1930, in The Railroad Trainman, Volume 47. `Frequently a big advantage can be gained by knowing how to give in at the right moment.` Fenelon `Sometimes the thing to do is to abstain from doing.` Val Kornea (b.1979) `Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.` Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) `Who ever is out of patience is out of possession of his soul.` Francis Bacon `Rash men are precipitate, and wish for dangers beforehand but draw back when they are in them, while brave men are keen in the moment of action, but quiet beforehand.` Aristotle (384BC-322BC), Nicomachean Ethics `The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.` Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) `One ship drives East, and another drives West, By the self-same gale that blows; 'Tis the set of the sail, and not the gale, That determines the way she goes.` Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1919) `Every organization is a perfect design to achieve the results it has achieved.` Unknown `Whoever wishes to keep a secret must hide the fact that he possesses one.` Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) `To wonder where the mind goes after the brain decays is as silly as asking where the 70-miles-per-hour have gone after a speeding auto has crashed into a tree.` Frank R. Zindler `Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.` Arthur C. Clarke `Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.` Ambrose Bierce (1842-1913), The Devil's Dictionary `A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.` Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) `A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.` Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) `Finally I was forced to conclude that the alleged existence of god is but a myth, born of fear. That all gods including the Christian god are but figments of the imagination or outright inventions of the mind. I reasoned that the environment of primitive man which lacked a scientific explanation of nature's torments had every reason to be permeated with superstition but that we with our advanced scientific knowledge have no reason to appease imaginary gods. As I continued boring into my books the searchlight of knowledge was thrown upon my long cherished beliefs. I saw them for what they were worth. Reluctantly I shed them one by one. I did not label myself right away. I hardly knew what label to use. At first I called myself a Humanist. Sometimes an agnostic. Sometimes a Rationalist. Sometimes a Secularist. After many years of study and thought and assimilation I prefer a term that states my position clearly and positively. That is why I today declare myself an atheist. I evolved into an atheist not because I wanted to but because the evidence in all my books overwhelmingly pointed to a materialistic universe and against the plausible existence of supernatural beings or gods of any description.` G. Vincent Runyon, Why I Left The Ministry And Became An Atheist `Atheism is the principled refusal to credit an idea that has no rational basis and makes no sense.` Harry Binswanger (b.1944), HBL `It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.` Albert Einstein (1879-1955), Albert Einstein: The Human Side, Princeton University Press `Some methodological atheists formulate the principle by saying that the burden of proof is always on any person making an existence claim, since, from a logical point of view, existence claims are only capable of proof, not disproof. No one has ever proven the nonexistence of Santa Claus, or elves, or unicorns, or anything else, simply because the very logic of an unrestricted existential proposition prohibits its disproof. It is impossible to go all over the universe and show that, for example, there are no elves anywhere. For this reason, rational methodology calls for us to deny the existence of all those things which have never been shown to exist. That is why we all regard it rational to deny the existence of Santa Claus, elves, unicorns, etc. And since God is in that same category, having never been shown to exist, it follows that rational methodology calls for us to deny the existence of God.` Theodore M. Drange `Faith is not a valid epistemological method.` Gordon Wood (b.1960) `Faith is a principled rejection of rationality.` Val Kornea (b.1979) `The foundation of morality should not be made dependent on myth nor tied to any authority lest doubt about the myth or about the legitimacy of the authority imperil the foundation of sound judgment and action.` Albert Einstein (1879-1955) `To rest one's case on faith is to concede that reason is on the side of one's enemies.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTf6NK0wsiA `It's called faith because it's not knowledge.` Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) `I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.` Richard Dawkins (b.1941) `We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.` Richard Dawkins (b.1941) `When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.` Stephen Roberts `There are hidden contradictions in the minds of people who "love Nature" while deploring the "artificialities" with which "Man has spoiled Nature". The obvious contradiction lies in their choice of words, which imply that Man and his artifacts are not part of "Nature"--but beavers and their dams are.` Robert Anson Heinlein (1907-1988) `The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on Earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but only to have the law of nature for his rule.` Samuel Adams (1722-1803) `Not a place upon earth might be so happy as America. Her situation is remote from all the wrangling world, and she has nothing to do but to trade with them.` Thomas Paine (1737-1809), 1776 `As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Musselmen; and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.` Treaty of Tripoli, 1796 `Either man's rights are inalienable, or they are not. You cannot say a thing such as "semi-inalienable" and consider yourself either honest or sane. When you begin making conditions, reservations and exceptions, you admit that there is something or someone above man's rights, who may violate them at his discretion. Who? Why, society--that is, the Collective. For what reason? For the good of the Collective. Who decides when rights should be violated? The Collective. If this is what you believe, move over to the side where you belong and admit that you are a Collectivist.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982) `Just as the notion that "Anything I do is right because I chose to do it," is not a moral principle, but a negation of morality--so the notion that "Anything society does is right because society chose to do it," is not a moral principle, but a negation of moral principles and the banishment of morality from social issues.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982) `A majority vote is not an epistemological validation of an idea. Voting is merely a proper political device--within a strictly, constitutionally delimited sphere of action--for choosing the practical means of implementing a society's basic principles. But those principles are not determined by vote.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982) `It is not society, nor any social right, that forbids you to kill--but the inalienable individual right of another man to live.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Textbook of Americanism, The Ayn Rand Column, 85. `The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty. Plainly, the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of liberty.` Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) `Majority rule only works if you're also considering individual rights. Because you can't have five wolves and one sheep voting on what to have for supper.` Larry Flynt (b.1942) `Democracy can itself be as tyrannical as a dictatorship, since it is the extent, not the source, of government power that impinges on freedom.` William F. Buckley, Jr. (1925-2008) `Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.` Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) `Property does not exist because there are laws, but laws exist because there is property.` Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) `Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), The Virtue of Selfishness `The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal `A free people claim their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.` Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) `If, before undertaking some action, you must obtain the permission of society--you are not free, whether such permission is granted to you or not. Only a slave acts on permission. A permission is not a right.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982) `Give to every other human being every right that you claim for yourself--that is my doctrine` Unknown `I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample underfoot.` Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899) `The one who compels his neighbor... treats him, not as a being with reason, but as an animal in whom reason is not.` Auberon Herbert (1838-1906) `Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where the gun begins.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Atlas Shrugged `Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add "within the limits of the law", because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.` Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) `No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.` Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) `I have sworn eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.` Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) `I contemplate with solemn reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.` Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) `The assertion that "all men are created equal" was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain and it was placed in the Declaration not for that, but for future use.` Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) `All honor to Jefferson--to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.` Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) `The genius who fights "every form of tyranny over the mind of man" is fighting a battle for which lesser men do not have the strength, but on which their freedom, their dignity, and their integrity depend.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Philosophy: Who Needs It `The graveyards are full of indispensable men.` Unknown `I want you to look at the birth of a miracle: the United States of America. If it is ever proper for men to kneel, we should kneel when we read the Declaration of Independence. The concept of individual rights is so prodigious a feat of political thinking that few men grasp it fully -- and 200 years have not been enough for other countries to understand it.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982) `Among the natural rights of the Colonists are these: First, a right to life; Secondly, to liberty; Thirdly, to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can. These are evident branches of, rather than deductions from, the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature.` Samuel Adams (1722-1803), "The Rights of the Colonists", The Report of the Committee of Correspondence to the Boston Town Meeting, Nov. 20, 1772 `Europe was created by history, America was created by philosophy.` Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013) `It took centuries of intellectual, philosophical development to achieve political freedom. It was a long struggle, stretching from Aristotle to John Locke to the Founding Fathers. The system they established was not based on unlimited majority rule, but on its opposite: on individual rights, which were not to be alienated by majority vote or minority plotting.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982) `It makes you wonder about the Europeans who chucked their whole life out the window, crossed the ocean in a sailboat in the 16th and 17th centuries, and chose to stay here, fighting for their life every step of the way. Almost none of them were 'nobles'; almost all worker-peasants. What made them do it? What made the one's who stayed, stay? A lot of the people in Europe today are descended from those who stayed. A lot of the people in the States are descended from people who chose to leave. Sometimes I think that the differences between Europeans and Americans are due to the attitudinal and other differences between those two groups centuries ago.` Beverley Eyre `It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our necessities but of their advantages.` Adam Smith (1723-1790), The Wealth of Nations `Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982) `Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal `A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business.` Eric Hoffer (1902-1983), The True Believer `The reason I talk to myself is that I'm the only one whose answers I accept.` George Carlin (1937-2008) `There is no conflict of interests among men, neither in business nor in trade nor in their most personal desires--if they omit the irrational from their view of the possible and destruction from their view of the practical.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Atlas Shrugged `Today, wanting someone else's money is called "need", wanting to keep your own money is called "greed", and "compassion" is when politicians arrange the transfer.` Joseph Sobran (1946-2010) `A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money.` G. Gordon Liddy `Think about how many children's lives we could save if we just use our imagination and appeal to emotion and government power.` Sam Axton `It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.` Thomas Sowell (b.1930) `You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours." (paraphrased) Lord Charles James Napier (1782-1853), Commander-in-Chief of the former British Army in India `Judge, and be prepared to be judged.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), The Virtue of Selfishness `If you don't have integrated principles you can't have integrity.` attributed to John Allison `Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil.` Thomas Paine (1737-1809), Common Sense, 1776 `The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all.` Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), 1787 letter to Abigail Adams Paris `What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms.` Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) `In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this; you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.` James Madison (1751-1836) `The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.` Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969) `You make ten billion dollars, you put in a billion. You make ten dollars, you put in one--of course, you gotta get rid of the loopholes--but, now some people say "well, that's not fair, because it doesn't hurt the guy who made ten billion dollars as much as the guy who made ten." Where does it say you have to hurt the guy? He just put a billion dollars in the pot. We don't need to hurt him.` Ben Carson (b.1951) `God, give me grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, Courage to change the things which should be changed, and the Wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.` Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) `Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scorn to smart Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams.` Mary Ellen Kelly `I've been hearing all my life about the Serious Philosophical Issues posed by life extension, and my attitude has always been that I'm willing to grapple with those issues for as many centuries as it takes.` Patrick Nielsen Hayden `Good men must die, but death cannot kill their names.` Spanish proverb `I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying.` Woody Allen (b. 1935) `It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.` H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) `One can lead a child to knowledge but one cannot make him think.` Robert Anson Heinlein (1907-1988), Starship Troopers `To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.` Thomas Paine (1737-1809) `A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer.` Bruce Lee (1940-1973) `You and I come by road or rail, but economists travel on infrastructure.` Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013) `Men are good in one way, but bad in many.` Aristotle (384BC-322BC), Nicomachean Ethics `Those are rare who fall without being degraded.` Victor Hugo (1802-1885), Les Miserables `There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.` Peter Drucker (1909-2005) `Never do today what you can put off till tomorrow. Delay may give clearer light as to what is best to be done.` Aaron Burr `A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship.` John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937) `Property is the fruit of labor; property is desirable; it is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become rich and, hence, is just encouragement to industry and enterprise.` Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) `That some achieve great success, is proof to all that others can achieve it as well.` Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) `Don't work for my happiness, my brothers--show me yours--show me that it is possible--show me your achievement--and the knowledge will give me courage for mine.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), The Fountainhead `The greatest gift you can give a child is an example of genuine adult happiness.` John Paquette `Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.` Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) `I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.` Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) `The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.` Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) `You cannot build character and courage by taking away a man's initiative and independence.` Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) `You, that have toiled during youth, to set your son upon higher ground, and to enable him to begin where you left off, do not expect that son to be what you were--diligent, modest, active, simple in his tastes, fertile in resources... Poverty educated you; wealth will educate him. You cannot suppose the result will be the same.` Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743-1825) `The way for a young man to rise is to improve himself in every way he can, never suspecting that anybody wishes to hinder him.` Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) `One thing I hate about the New Deal is that it is killing what, to me, is the American pioneering spirit. I simply do not know what to tell my own boys, leaving school and confronting this new world whose ideal is Security and whose practice is dependence upon government instead of upon one's self.... All the old character-values seem simply insane from a practical point of view; the self-reliant, the independent, the courageous man is penalized from every direction.` Rose Wilder Lane (1886-1968) `You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.` attributed to Abraham Lincoln by Ronald Reagan `To take from one, because it is thought that his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, "the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry, and the fruits acquired by it".` Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), 1816 letter to Joseph Milligan `Why doesn't prison qualify as a "social safety net"?` Val Kornea (b.1979) `You work for the improvement of mankind, secure in the knowledge that one six-billionth of that improvement will be yours to revel in.` Harry Binswanger (b.1944), HBL `A man must stand straight, and not be kept straight by others.` Marcus Aurelius (121-180) `Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.` Winston Churchill (1874-1965) `The steps of a man sound heavier when he is alone in the hall.` Louis L'Amour (1908-1988), The Walking Drum `I have need to be all on fire, for there are mountains of ice around me to melt.` William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879) `You can only lean against that which stands fast.` Unknown `We have within us the capacity to manufacture the very commodity we seek from external experience.` Dan Gilbert (b.1957) `We often believe ourselves to be independent simply because no one commands us, and because we command others; but the nobleman who needs to call a servant to his aid is really a dependent through his own inferiority. The paralytic who cannot take off his boots because of a pathological fact, and the prince who dare not take them off because of a social fact, are in reality reduced to the same condition. In reality, he who is served is limited in his independence. This concept will be the foundation of the dignity of the man of the future; "I do not wish to be served, because I am not impotent." And this idea must be gained before men can feel themselves to be really free.` Maria Montessori (1870-1952), The Montessori Method `Economizing is attaining the highest valued ends with the least valued means.` Unknown `Cost is the value of the foregone option.` Unknown `We knew the world could not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita: "I am became Death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.` J Robert Oppenheimer, (1904-1967) American physicist, Recalling the explosion of the first atomic bomb near Almogordo, New Mexico [Jul. 15, 1945] `I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to those teachers.` Kahlil Gibran, Sand and Foam, 1926 `I would rather live in a society which treated children as adults than one which treated adults as children.` Lizard `The greatest barrier to achievement and success is not lack of talent or ability but rather the feeling that achievement and success, above a certain level, are outside our self-concept--our image of who we are and what is appropriate to us. The greatest barrier to love is the secret fear that we are unlovable. The greatest barrier to happiness is the wordless sense that happiness is not our proper destiny.` Nathaniel Branden (b.1930) `Altruism is charity without love.` Nicole Tedesco (b.1963) `Supposing a senator asked you for advice about whether drilling a hole should be done in his state; and you decide it would be better in some other state. If you don't publish such a result, it seems to me you're not giving scientific advice. You're being used. If your answer happens to come out in the direction the government or the politicians like, they can use it as an argument in their favor; if it comes out the other way, they don't publish at all. That's not giving scientific advice.` Richard Feynman (1918-1988) `Morality imposes itself on us through reality.` Louise Lamontagne `Love, with very young people, is a heartless business. We drink at that age from thirst, or to get drunk; it is only later in life that we occupy ourselves with the individuality of our wine. A young man in love is essentially enraptured by the forces within himself.` Isak Dinesen aka Karen Blixen (1885-1962) `Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is.` Rollo May `Absence lessens mediocre passions but augments great ones, just as the wind blows out candles but starts conflagrations.` Francois de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680) `A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.` Gloria Steinem (b.1934) `One shining quality lends a luster to another, or hides some glaring defect.` William Hazlitt `Personal beauty is a greater recommendation than any letter of reference.` Aristotle (384BC-322BC) `Happiness is more effective than cosmetics.` Rae Foley, Ominous Star `I don't mind hidden depths but I insist that there be a surface.` James Nicoll `The logic that permits a person to call down God's wrath on anyone for displaying a bit of God's own handiwork does, we must admit, escape us. If the human body--far and away the most remarkable, the most complicated, the most perfect and the most beautiful creation on this earth--can become objectionable, obscene or abhorrent, when purposely posed and photographed to capture that remarkable perfection and beauty, then the world is a far more cockeyed place than we are willing to admit.` Hugh Hefner (b.1926) `There's a difference between beauty and charm. A beautiful woman is one I notice. A charming woman is one who notices me.` John Erskine `Sex is kicking death in the ass while singing.` Charles Bukowski (1920-1994) `Man is for woman a means: the purpose is always the child.` Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) `The one who loves the least, controls the relationship.` Often attributed to Dr. Robert Newton Anthony `Deference is the most indirect and the most elegant of all compliments.` William Shenstone (1714-1763), Essays on Men and Manners (1804) `The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy... neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.` Dr. John W. Gardner `The higher our self-esteem, the more open, honest, and appropriate our communications are likely to be, because we believe our thoughts have value and therefore we welcome rather than fear clarity.` Nathaniel Branden (b.1930), The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem `Whoever knows he is deep, strives for clarity; whoever would like to appear deep to the crowd, strives for obscurity.` Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) `When men feel strongly about an issue, yet refuse to name it, when they fight savagely for some seemingly incoherent, unintelligible goal--one may be sure that their actual goal would not stand public identification.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal `Existentialism, in essence, consists of pointing to modern philosophy and declaring: "Since *this* is reason, to hell with it!"` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), The Return of the Primitive `I have always known that one day I would take this path though yesterday I did not know it would be today.` Ariwara no Narihari `Just as eating against one's will is injurious to health, so study without a liking for it spoils the memory, and it retains nothing it takes in.` Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) `There are only two places in our world where time takes precedence over the job to be done: school and prison.` William Glasser `It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.` Albert Einstein (1879-1955) `In some cases, a man's sense of life is better (closer to the truth) than the kind of ideas he accepts. In other cases, his sense of life is much worse than the ideas he professes to accept but is unable fully to practice. Ironically enough, it is man's emotions, in such cases, that act as the avengers of his neglected or betrayed intellect.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), The Romantic Manifesto `The price we pay when pursuing any art or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.` James Arthur Baldwin (1924-1987) `One never dives into the water to save a drowning man more eagerly than when there are others present who dare not take the risk.` Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) `One does not strive for joy... joy accompanies; joy does not move.` Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) `Architecture is a hypothesis about the future that holds that subsequent change will be confined to that part of the design space encompassed by that architecture.` Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder `A period of exploration and experimentation is often beneficial before making enduring architectural commitments.` Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder `Premature architecture can be more dangerous than none at all, as unproved architectural hypotheses turn into straightjackets that discourage evolution and experimentation.` Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder `A public figure is often condemned for an action that is taken unfairly out of context but nevertheless reflects, in a compelling and encapsulated manner, an underlying truth about that person.` Marti Hearst `Fame is the excrement of creativity, it's the shit that comes out the back end, it's a by-product of it. People think it's the excrement that you should be eating. It's not.` Bruce Dickinson (b.1958) `Mr. Atlee is a very modest man. But then he has much to be modest about.` Winston Churchill (1874-1965) `I don't have a short temper. I just have a quick reaction to bullshit.` Unknown `Nirvana is not ultimate happiness but a substitute desired by some of the weak who are incapable of achieving that state of joyous power which they, too, would prefer if they had the strength to attain it.` Walter Kaufmann explaining Nietzsche's thoughts, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist `I want to make something clear: I am not a conservative. I think that today's conservatives are worse than today's liberals... If anyone destroys this country, it will be the conservatives--because they do not know how to preach capitalism, to explain it to the people, because they do nothing except apologize, and because they're all altruists. They're all based on religious altruism and, on that combination of ideas, you cannot save this country.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Tom Snyder Interview `One does not write a love story while making love.` Collete (d. 1954), Lettre au petit Corsaire `It was he who had willed it, it was he who had made it; he had thrust it into his own heart, and at this hour, looking upon it, he might have the same satisfaction that an armorer would have, who should recognize his own mark upon a blade, on withdrawing it all reeking from his breast.` Victor Hugo (1802-1885) about Jean Valjean, Les Miserables `Abstainer, n. A weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure.` Ambrose Bierce (1842-1913), The Devil's Dictionary `The argument that groups have to be represented according to their percentage in the population implies, whether or not people realize it, that groups with above-average qualifications and performances must be denied the places that they qualify for.` Thomas Sowell (b.1930), Race Rationales vs. Results `Minimum wage rates, whether enforced by government decree or by labor union pressure and compulsion, are useless if they fix wage rates at the market level. But if they try to raise wage rates above the level which the unhampered labour market would have determined, they result in permanent unemployment of a great part of the potential labour force.` Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), Socialism `The comparative advantage of poorer countries is precisely that their wages are low, thus reducing the costs of production. If multinational corporations had to pay the same wages as in their home countries, they would not bother to invest in poorer countries at all.` Edwin A. Locke, Anti-Globalization: The Left's Violent Assault on Global Prosperity `Minimum wage laws tragically generate unemployment, especially among the poorest and least skilled or educated workers... Because a minimum wage, of course, does not guarantee any worker's employment; it only prohibits, by force of law, anyone from being hired at the wage which would pay his employer to hire him.` Murray Rothbard (1926-1995), For a New Liberty `Minimum wage is $0.` Val Kornea (b.1979) `No one lies so boldly as the man who is indignant.` Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) `The worst tempered people I have ever met were those who knew that they were wrong.` Wilson Mizner `Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear.` Ambrose Redmoon `I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.` Frank Herbert (1920-1986), Dune `An emotion that clashes with your reason, an emotion that you cannot explain or control, is only the carcass of that stale thinking which you forbade your mind to revise.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Atlas Shrugged `If it is proved that the theory concerned is untenable, the notion of rationalization is a psychological interpretation of the causes which made their authors liable to error. But if we are not in a position to find any fault in the theory advanced, no appeal to the concept of rationalization can possibly explode its validity.` Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), Human Action `The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty bothers.` Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), A Moveable Feast `Do not call any work menial until you have watched a proud person do it.` Robert Brault `If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom.` Dwight D. Eisenhower `The activities you spent your time on yesterday were the things that were important to you. Calendars don't lie.` Scott Ginsberg `I never ask God to give me anything; I only ask him to put me where things are.` Mexican Proverb `Not all opposing viewpoints come from people who oppose you.` Robert Brault `Chaperons don't enforce morality; they force immorality to be discreet.` Judith Martin `An idea is only as dangerous as your inability to refute it.` Michael J. Hurd, Ph.D. `Consciousness is that part of reality which is capable of changing its mind.` Val Kornea (b.1979) `Depression is the inability to construct a future.` Attributed to Rollo May `When politicians control everything, everything is political.` attributed to Brian Sellnow `The purpose of life is to thrive.` Val Kornea (b.1979) `What will you do if all your problems aren't solved by the time you die?` Unknown `Death is not a deadline.` Val Kornea (b.1979) `A man should live if only to satisfy his curiosity.` Yiddish Proverb `The aim of an argument or discussion should not be victory, but progress.` Joseph Joubert, Pensées, 1842 `When arguing, be a surgeon, not a butcher.` Val Kornea (b.1979) `Persons who insist to themselves that under one set of conditions only can they lead interesting and satisfying lives lay themselves open to bitter disappointments and frustrations.` Hortense Odlum (1881-1970) `The problem is not that there are problems. The problem is expecting otherwise and thinking that having problems is a problem.` Theodore Rubin, playwright `We delude ourselves if we imagine there is any culture or society in which we will not have to face the challenge of making ourselves appropriate to life.` Nathaniel Branden (b.1930), The Power of Self-Esteem `To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men--that is genius.` Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) `Few human creatures would consent to be changed into any of the lower animals, for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast's pleasures.` John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), Utilitarianism `The solution to the problem of tragedy and malevolence is the willingness to face them.` Jordan Peterson `They call you heartless: but you have a heart, and I love you for being ashamed to show it. You are ashamed of your flood, while others are ashamed of their ebb.` Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) `An intellect does not function on the premise of its own impotence.` Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal `One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.` Carl Sagan (1934-1996)