 Without objects self-consciousness would be nonsense.
Johann Friedrich Herbart
Psychology as a Science (1824)
Does my conclusion differ from 'common-sense' and if so can I isolate why that is okay?
Steve Wolfer
http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/RoRFitness/0087.shtml#7
We need to go 'John Galt' and unplug ourselves from a corrupt system.
Glenn Beck
Glenn Beck Program (radio), 9/20/2010, paraphrased from my memory
So I came to my Christian faith later in life, and it was because the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead - being my brothers' and sisters' keeper ... . And I think also understanding that Jesus Christ dying for my sins spoke to the humility we all have to have as human beings, that we're sinful and we're flawed and we make mistakes, and that we achieve salvation through the grace of God.
President Barack Obama
http://www.startribune.com/politics/national/103938653.html?elr=KArks8c7PaP3iUMEaPc:E7_ec7PaP3iUiacyKUnciaec8O7EyUr
"Do you think that we want those laws to be observed? We want them broken. There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power the 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."
Ayn Rand
LibertyTree.ca
" ‘From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged,” Whittaker Chambers wrote here 53 years ago, “a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: ‘To a gas chamber — go!’” What he did not write is that Ayn Rand throws in a gas chamber. It’s about two-thirds through, in a chapter called “The Moratorium on Brains,” than which I reread no farther. (Our president seems to have inspired — which is not quite the word — half the country to read Miss Rand, and I wanted to remind myself what she was teaching them.)"
Jason L. Steorts
National Review Online, "The Great Ghastly Rand"
"It is a feeling to be hunted. They come in uniforms . . . "
Marta Jaworski
reason.com, "Sorry, But Our Zoning Regulations Forbid You From Celebrating Your Freedom"
“I have been led to the conclusion that as long as a philosopher does not carry out his analysis of measurable objects to the point where the mathematician can find unities, measures, and dimensions he must surely still be hanging on to some confusion, or at least the predicates of his propositions do not apply uniformly to the subjects.” —J.H. Lambert to Kant (Feb. 3, 1766)
Lambert
Her [Ayn Rand's] absolutism is a reasoned position that contrasts with altruistic or low self-esteem positions that value or use large doses of uncertainty or humility.
Steve Wolfer
http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/Quotes/1708.shtml#3
"... there’s also a streak in Ayn Rand that is very right-wing and explains in part why, despite her atheism and despite the obviously anti-conservative elements of her thought, nonetheless there are deeper elements that are very appealing to the conservative mind. Those are, firstly, her absolutism and secondly, her attempt to ground the case for liberty in nature."
Brink Lindsey
Reason.com, "Brink Lindsey on the Classics of Conservatism--Traditional and Liberal Varieties"
"Newcomen drove 12,238 miles across 30 U.S. states to pen a message using GPS tracking that can only be read using Google Earth. The message? 'Read Ayn Rand.'"
Peter Suderman
Gizmodo.com via Reason.com, "This Country Has Ayn Rand Written All Over It"
"This means that the government may not refuse a zoning permit to a group because it’s Muslim, or Tea Party, or Socialist, or anti-gay-rights. It may not try to use landmarking law to bar the group from reconstructing a building, if the law is being used because of the group’s message.... These are basic principles of American free speech law, and of American religious freedom law. They help protect all of us, liberal or conservative, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or atheist."
Eugene Volokh
Volokh.com via Reason.com re: Ground Zero mosque
"We don't need to make a movie out of [Atlas Shrugged] ... We are living it right now."
David Kelley
"Atlas Shrugged: From Fiction to Fact in 52 years"
"permission [to build a mosque near Ground Zero] should be refused, and if they go ahead and build it, the government should bomb it out of existence, evacuating it first, with no compensation to any of the property owners involved in this monstrosity."
Leonard Peikoff
"Forced to be Free", Reason.com, via link at Peikoff.com
[Ayn Rand] made a, I believe, an unneccessary polarity between selfishness -- or self-interest -- and altruism. She saw those as opposites. She saw that, or believed, altruism was fundamentally evil. ... I always felt like that was just inaccurate to human nature: That fundamentally human beings are both self-interested and capable of love, and that you can't understand human beings unless you see that we are both of them -- and so I reject the polarity.
John Mackey
http://www.booktv.org/search.aspx?For=freedomfest
"To say 'I love you' one must first be able to say the 'I.' "
Ayn Rand
jittery.com
"Men are the only animals that devote themselves, day in and day out, to making one another unhappy. It is an art like any other. Its virtuosi are called altruists."
H. L. Mencken
LewRockwell.com
"Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth. "
Aristotle
To deal with men by force is as impractical as to deal with nature by persuasion.
Ayn Rand
Facebook | Ayn Rand
Enjoy your life to the fullest, if only to spite them
Steve Wolfer
http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/Jokes/0408.shtml#16
There is no first strike in karate.
Master Shoshin Nagamine
The Essence of Okinawan Karate-Do
Slavery is another matter - the most vicious habit humans fall into and the hardest to break... After a culture falls ill of it, it gets rooted in the economic system and laws, in men's habits and attitudes. You abolish it; you drive it underground - there it lurks, ready to spring up again, in the minds of people who think it is their 'natural' right to own other people. You can't reason with them; you can kill them but you can't change their minds.
Robert A. Heinlein
Citizen of the Galaxy
Altruism does not tell you to abstain from pursuing values. It tells you to pursue values in order to sacrifice them.
Nathaniel Branden
The Vision of Ayn Rand
Our rights supersede national boundaries...Rights supersede nations.
Michael F Dickey
http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/ArticleDiscussions/2037_3.shtml#77
The commercialism of Christmas reinforces our goodwill. When you scour the malls in search of the perfect gift for a loved one and witness the cornucopia of goods and lights and decorations, you can't help but feel that your fellow human beings are not enemies to be feared or fools to be avoided but fellow travelers and potential allies in the quest for joy. It's no accident that America, the world's most productive country, is also its most benevolent.
Onkar Ghate
http://www.usnews.com/articles/opinion/2009/12/18/commercialism-only-adds-to-joy-of-the-holidays_print.htm
We at Goldman represent unicque clusters of DNA...A shared disinterest in growing hair, for instance, isn't a coincidence of nature but an expression of healthy like-mindedness. 'The world is a pool table', our naked headed CEO likes to tell us. 'And all the people in it are either strips or solids. You alone are the cue balls'.
Michael Lewis
Bashing Goldman sahs is simply a game for fools
Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle,
and the life of the candle will not be shortened.
Happiness never decreases by being shared.
Buddha
The sadness of evil men is that they believe no truth that does not paint the world in their colours.
Eric Ambler
"The Schirmer Inheritance," Vintage (2003), ISBN 0375726764
Now, there is a certain class of sophisticated modern theologian who will say something like this: "Good heavens, of course we are not so naive or simplistic as to care whether God exists. Existence is such a 19th-century preoccupation! It doesn't matter whether God exists in a scientific sense. What matters is whether he exists for you or for me. If God is real for you, who cares whether science has made him redundant? Such arrogance! Such elitism." Well, if that's what floats your canoe, you'll be paddling it up a very lonely creek. The mainstream belief of the world's peoples is very clear. They believe in God, and that means they believe he exists in objective reality, just as surely as the Rock of Gibraltar exists. If sophisticated theologians or postmodern relativists think they are rescuing God from the redundancy scrap-heap by downplaying the importance of existence, they should think again. Tell the congregation of a church or mosque that existence is too vulgar an attribute to fasten onto their God, and they will brand you an atheist. They'll be right.
Richard Dawkins
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203440104574405030643556324.html
"I would like evolution to join the roster of other discredited religions, like the Cargo Cult of the South Pacific. Practitioners of Cargo Cult believed that manufactured products were created by ancestral spirits, and if they imitated what they had seen the white man do, they could cause airplanes to appear out of the sky, bringing valuable cargo like radios and TVs. So they constructed “airport towers” out of bamboo and “headphones” out of coconuts and waited for the airplanes to come with the cargo. It may sound silly, but in defense of the Cargo Cult, they did not wait as long for evidence supporting their theory as the Darwinists have waited for evidence supporting theirs. "
Ann Coulter
[Y]ou ask him what does he regard the facts of reality as: a necessity or a contingency? He'll say, 'Of course it's a contingency, because God made it this way, and he could have made it another.' And you say, 'Good-bye.'
Ayn Rand
Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology
I've never bought into [sacrifice as the moral ideal]. Call me an Objectivist, call me what you will.
Jason Lewis (Radio Host)
http://www.jasonlewisshow.com/main.html
"There is no such thing as a good excuse."
John P. Grier
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_P._Grier
If the average American were asked his opinion of congressmen, among the more polite terms you'll hear are thieves and crooks, liars and manipulators, hustlers and quacks. But what do the same people say when our nation faces a major problem? "Government ought to do something!"
Walter E. Williams
http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=5540
Most of our nation's great problems, including our economic problems, have as their root decaying moral values.
Walter E. Williams
http://townhall.com/Columnists/WalterEWilliams/2009/04/01/our_problem_is_immorality
As I see it, the debate turns, ultimately, on whether you hold man's survival, or man's survival qua man as your touchstone. My argument, essentially, is that it is only the latter that Objectivism contemplates.
Mindy Newton
http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/ObjectivismQ&A/0331_3.shtml#74
The highest moral act anyone can do is productive work.
Jason Lewis (Radio Host)
http://www.jasonlewisshow.com/main.html
But the triumph of ideas was completed by the Treatise of Human Nature [by David Hume], which discards spirits also, and leaves ideas and impressions as the sole existences in the universe. ... It seemed very natural to think, that the Treatise of Human Nature required an author, and a very ingenious one too; but now we learn, that it is only a set of ideas which came together, and arranged themselves by certain associations and attractions.
Thomas Reid
An Inquiry Into the Human Mind
I'd go so far as to say that recognition of the invalidity of the stolen concept is Objectivism in its essence. Rand's ethics depends upon it - her identification of the concept of value depending upon the concept of life is an example. Attempts to deny her axiomatic concepts based upon more derivative ideas such as doubt are another example of the fallacy. Almost every denial of one of Rand's formulations is based upon the stolen concept.
Ted Keer
What is original to Objectivism
There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.
Pablo Picasso
Fortune favors the prepared mind.
Louis Pasteur
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/l/louispaste159478.html
Don't count on luck or God for success, but on your own thinking.
Leonard Peikoff
Peikoff explaining Rand's version of "Goodbye" (i.e., "Good premises") in the Epilogue to VOR
You know, I once read an interesting book which said that, uh, most people lost in the wilds, they, they die of shame. Yeah, see, they die of shame. "What did I do wrong? How could I have gotten myself into this?" And so they sit there and they... die. Because they didn't do the one thing that would save their lives. Thinking.
David Mamet (Writing for character Charles Morse in movie: The Edge)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119051/
All your power to accomplish, your ability to be effective, make decisions, be happy, and to exert maximum personal control over your life, lies only in each SUCCESSION OF PRESENT MOMENTS.
Charles Givens
And yet, as a result of Atlas -- just as a consequence of the telegraph, telephone, radio and television -- the world has changed. The voices of reason do speak up and are heard, if only to encourage each other. That, to me, was the singular benefit of Rand's works: the realization that standing alone does not mean being alone.
Michael Marotta
http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/Quotes/1208.shtml#7
Reason demanded, Choice directed, and Courage sustained.
Steve Wolfer
http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/Videos/0093.shtml#9
If your life is built on pessimism, you are not an Objectivist. If you hold the majority of humanity in contempt, you are not an Objectivist. If you have become so jaded that your sanction of a person or concept requires perfection, you are not an Objectivist.
George Cordero
If plan A isn't working, it is good to have a plan B. I suspect Objectivism could use a good plan B.
Jay Abbott
http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/GeneralForum/1292_1.shtml#35
Jurisdiction is a moral concept applicable only to legitimate nations, nations which respect the individual civil liberties of their populace. We have no jurisdiction to apprehend a criminal in France, France is a free nation. Iran is a non free nation, as such, we do not need jurisdictional approval from whatever murderous theocratic tyrants happens to be oppressing the populace this year in order to act in our own long term rational self interest, either by removing that dictator from power or apprehending a terrorist residing in that nation.
Michael F Dickey
http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/Blogs/0039.shtml#16
Michael has his goals and I have mine... I don't think anyone should get in the way of what I want. I'm not going to feel bad if I go out and race my heart out and end up winning.
Ian Crocker
Washington Post: August 14, 2008
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