 "Whatever is done for men takes away from the stimulus and necessity of doing things for themselves. The value of legislation as an agent in human advancement has been much over estimated. No Laws, however stringent, can make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident, or the drunken sober".
Samuel Smiles
Self Help
If we [humans] disappeared overnight, the world would probably be better off.
David Attenborough
The Daily Telegraph, London, 12 November
We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
George Bernard Shaw
There, where the state ends - there only begins the man who is not superfluous: there begins the song of the necessary man, the unique and irreplaceable melody.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Don't pass judgement (about private conduct) unless you know something is improper, and so don't wish to deal with the person. If you are not personally involved, don't pass judgement.
Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Answers, p. 138.
My proof convinces the ignorant, and the wise man's proof convinces me. But he whose reasoning falls between wisdom and ignorance, I neither can convince him, nor can he convince me.
Kahlil Gibran
Spiritual Sayings of Kahlil Gibran
Seven times have I despised my soul: The first time when I saw her being meek that she might attain height. The second time when I saw her limping before the crippled. The third time when she was given to choose between the hard and the easy, and she chose the easy. The fourth time when she committed a wrong, and comforted herself that others also commit wrong. The fifth time when she forbore for weakness, and attributed her patience to strength. The sixth time when she despised the ugliness of a face, and knew not that it was one of her own masks. And the seventh time when she sang a song of praise, and deemed it a virtue.
Kahlil Gibran
Sand and Foam
Behold here is a paradox: the deep and the high are nearer to one another than the mid-level to either.
Kahlil Gibran
Sand and Foam
A pearl is a temple built by pain around a grain of sand. What longing built our bodies and around what grains?
Kahlil Gibran
Sand and Foam
A proof of courage ? To step into someone else’s shoes!
Ciro D'Agostino
I do not believe that men are afraid of dying, they are afraid of being cowards.
Ciro D'Agostino
Passion with out technique is furor!
Ciro D'Agostino
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
Mahatma Gandhi
That something happened to you is of no importance to anyone, not even to you. The important thing about you is what you choose to make happen - your values and choices. That which happened by accident - what family you were born into, in what country, and where you went to school - is totally unimportant.
Ayn Rand
"Over and over the jihadist enemy tells us why he wants to kill us, and over and over we dismiss his words or reduce them to our own categories. Paralyzed by our fear of being “insensitive” to cultural differences, and deluded by our materialist preconceptions that reduce religion to an expression of some more “real” cause, we refuse to name clearly the enemy: an Islamic faith that for centuries has killed, enslaved, plundered, ravaged, and conquered in the service of its arrogant assurance of its spiritual superiority."
Bruce Thornton
http://victorhanson.com/articles/thornton101305.html
"You seem to imply that when another bookstore closes, it is our obligation to offer what they had on their shelves. How does one go about copying another person's vision?"
Steve Riggio
Barnes and Noble Booksellers, in response to "Letter from a Concerned Customer"
I must say I am impressed with the SOLOists who have shown up here. Both in terms of intellectual seriousness and basic civility, you folks are a BIG step up from the ARI people I have encountered!
Michael Prescott
From the blog of a best-selling suspense author and one who has rejected Objectivism - http://michaelprescott.typepad.com/michael_prescotts_blog/2005/05/it_just_gets_wo.html
People change their own minds, or their minds don't really change.
Kevin Haggerty
"My personal life," says Ayn Rand, "is a postscript to my novels: it consists of the sentence, 'And I mean it.' I have always lived by the philosophy I present in my books--and it works for me, as it works for my characters. The concretes differ, the abstractions are the same." ... "I trust that no one will tell me that men such as I wrote about don't exist. That this book has been written--and published--is proof that they do."
Ayn Rand
"About the Author," at the end of Atlas Shrugged
I think a lot of people are afraid of freedom. They want their lives to be controlled, to be put into a box... Why should someone put a limit on how much fun I can have, how much I can accomplish?
Drew Carey
www.reason.com
"A dogma is a set of beliefs accepted on faith; that is, without rational justification or against rational evidence. A dogma is a matter of blind faith."
Ayn Rand
Jodie Foster, on career and motherhood: ``I hear my mother's voice -- `Should you have walked away from that? Will you be able to take care of yourself and your kids? You're getting old, it won't last. ...' But the choices are easily made. I'm not going to miss that Thanksgiving breakfast. I'm not going to let someone else pick out their shoes.''
Jodie Foster
The Los Angeles Times
Snowflakes, like people, are all different and beautiful, but they can be a nuisance when they lose their identity in a mob
Anonymous
The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do. It is the freedom to refrain, withdraw, and abstain which makes a totalitarian regime impossible.
Eric Hoffer
Rand was also true to her values, an attitude which today is regarded as downright rude in dry, academic circles. If Rand admired something, her praise was an exultant hymn—when she admired something, she hero-worshipped. Conversely, if Rand did not think highly of something or someone, her attack could be merciless. Her sense of justice demanded this attitude ...
James S. Valliant
The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics
I am. I exist - that is certain; but for how long do I exist? For as long as I think; for it might perhaps happen, if I totally ceased thinking, that I would, at the same time, cease to be.
Rene Descartes
Meditations on First Philosophy
Within ten days thou wilt seem a god to those to whom thou art now a beast and an ape, if thou wilt return to thy principles and to worship of reason.
Marcus Aurelius
Meditations, Book 4, verse 16
The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the Supreme Being in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.
Thomas Jefferson
Letter to John Adams, 11 April 1823
It is terrifying when evil is so confident that it seeks no subterfuge, but instead, plainly presents itself.
Scott DeSalvo
Scott DeSalvo, SOLO
Severally on the occasion of everything that thou doest, pause and ask thyself, if death is a dreadful thing because it deprives thee of this.
Marcus Aurelius
The Meditations
God is a hypothesis, and, as such, stands in need of proof; the onus probandi [burden of proof] rests on the theist
Percy Bysshe Shelley
"To abolish vice, establish virtue. To establish virtue, enshrine thought. To enshrine thought, identify its relationship to reality.
Leonard Peikoff
Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand
No dictator, no invader can hold an imprisoned population by force of arms forever. There is no greater power in the universe than the need for freedom. Against that power, governments and tyrants and armies cannot stand.
G'Kar
The Long, Twilight Struggle - Babylon 5 Season 2
Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world was here first.
Mark Twain
Civility in the face of evil is no virtue; rage in the face of nihilism is no vice.
Lindsay Perigo
From his essay "This Boy's Not For Turning."
You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice. If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill. I will choose a path that's clear. I will choose Free Will.
Rush
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
Theodore Roosevelt
'When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.'
Albert Einstein
http://www.physlink.com/
Hey, fellas: there's something out there that electrocutes people on beaches, collapses buildings like cardboard, and drowns ships and villages. It's called nature. The next time the western horizon flames with crimson, remember that this is what Foucault never saw. Foucault was struck down by the elemental force he repressed and edited out of his system. Science, disdained by Foucaldians, is our only hope for controlling the retrovirus and marauding infections of AIDS. Science and society are our frail barriers against the turbulence of cruel, indifferent nature.
Camille Paglia
from the essay "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders," in her book Sex, Art, and American Culture.
When you have robbed a man of everything, he is no longer in your power. He is free again.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
"As long as you assume that you are making the weather, what can you do? You will try in vain to make good weather and you will never succeed, and because you are all the time angry at yourself for making rain, you will never invent an umbrella."
Carl Jung
Jung's Seminar on Nietzsche's Zarathrustra
Man rises above the perceptual level by integrating his percepts into concepts, his concepts into principles, his principles into sciences, and all of his sciences into a philosophy.
Ayn Rand
(The Art of Non-Fiction, p.27)
"The meek shall inherit the Earth. The rest of us will travel to the stars."
Michael Marotta
THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN BILLION Discussion
Did you know that you need a vocabulary at least 10 times larger for thinking than you do for talking?
Anonymous
http://www.thelatinroad.com/
There are no niggers; there are only black-skinned people whom some white-skinned people don't like and call "niggers." There are no Christ-killers; there are only Jews whom some Christians don't like and call "Christ-killers." Similarly, there are no addicts; there are only people who take some drugs which some other people think they should not take and who therefore call them "addicts."
Thomas S. Szasz
Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplacable spark. In the hopeless swamps of the not quite, the not yet, and the not at all, do not let the hero in your soul perish and leave only frustration for the life you deserved, but never have been able to reach. The world you desire can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.
Ayn Rand
In literature, as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others.
Andre Maurois
Andre Maurois, French writer
There have always been people without judgment but this is the first era in which being non-judgmental is considered good -- though how anything can be considered good if you are non-judgmental is another puzzle.
Thomas Sowell
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/ts20050714.shtml
[On what he called 'The Slacker State'] I don't want to have my money scalped off me to maintain other people's children. I don't like other people; I particularly don't like their children; I deeply disapprove of their proliferation making the globe uninhabitable. The fucking idiots - I don't want to pay for their fucking.
A.L. Rowse
http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/biography/0,6121,935394,00.html
Therefore a wise prince ought to adopt such a course that his citizens will always in every sort and kind of circumstance have need of the state and of him, and then he will always find them faithful.
Nicolo Machiavelli
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext98/tprnc11.txt
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