 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
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.
Unknown Author
Unknown
I deal with the life-givers, not with the cannibals.
Ayn Rand
Atlas Shrugged
I told you where your course would take you. It has. ... I'm not going to help you pretend -- by arguing with you -- that the reality you're talking about is not what it is, that there's still a way to make it work and to save your neck. There isn't. ... I didn't come here to argue.
Ayn Rand
Atlas Shrugged
Listen or your tongue will keep you deaf.
Anonymous
Native American Proverb
“Man's proper stature is not one of mediocrity, failure, frustration, or defeat, but one of achievement, strength, and nobility. In short, man can and ought to be a hero.”
Mike Mentzer
There is no ultimate standard for what is legal. "Legal" is whatever we choose to make legal.
Nathan Hawking
SoloHq
Ethics is not a mystic fantasy — nor a social convention — nor a dispensable, subjective luxury.... Ethics is an objective, metaphysical necessity of man’s survival — not by the grace of the supernatural nor of your neighbors nor of your whims, but by the grace of reality and the nature of life.
Ayn Rand
'The Objectivist Ethics': The Virtue of Selfishness
If there is no great glorious end to all this, if nothing we do matters -- then all that matters is what we do. 'Cause that's all there is. What we do, now, today.
Angel
"Angel" (Epiphany)
I am so fortunate to have found, on Solo and elsewhere, people who are self-aware, women who have earned the right to be treated as equals, individuals who recognize and appreciate my value. These are the people who have everything to do with me; they enrich my life and I rejoice in their existence.
Barbara Branden
Jennifer Iannolo's New Mantra
"Very few art works are called Spit on Shit. It's about being alive in the western world," George says. "What else?"
Gilbert and George
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1497071,00.html
In fact, instead of saying that man is the only political animal, what I perhaps should say even more sharply here is that man is the only constitutional animal.
Mortimer J. Adler
Adler M.J. The Great Ideas. Peru, Illinois: Open Court, 2000.
"Fear is the mindkiller."
Frank Herbert
"Paul Atreides" -DUNE
You must be the change you wish to see in the world.
Mahatma Gandhi
http://www.loveisearned.com/html/quotations.htm
I quit when the court of appeals reversed my ruling. The purpose for which I had chosen my work, was my resolve to be a guardian of justice. But the laws they asked me to enforce made me the executor of the vilest injustice conceivable. I was asked to use force to violate the rights of disarmed men, who came before me to seek my protection for their rights. Litigants obey the verdict of a tribunal solely on the premise that there is an objective rule of conduct, which they both accept. Now I saw that one man was bound by it, but the other was not, one was to obey a rule, the other was to assert an arbitrary wish - his need - and the law was to stand on the side of the wish. Justice was to consist of upholding the unjustifiable. I quit - because I could not have borne to hear the words 'Your Honor' address to me by an honest man.
Judge Narragansett, Atlas Shrugged
http://www.loveisearned.com/html/quotations.htm
"Greatnessis a transitory experience...It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him."
Frank Herbert
"Collected Sayings of the Muad' Dib" -DUNE
Never argue with an idiot. They bring you down to their level and beat you with experience.
Unknown Author
I use my tongue as a guide.
Jennifer Iannolo
Man moves from knowledge to more advanced knowledge, automatizing his identifications and discoveries as he proceeds--turning his brain into an ever more efficacious instrument, if and to the extent that he continues the growth process.
Nathaniel Branden
The Psychology of Self-Esteem
Morality gains all of its ground out of the actualization of individual life. Only by reference to this individual actualization can moral judgment gain prescriptive ground.
Edward D. Thompson
http://solohq.com/Forum/NewsDiscussions/0712.shtml#5
Only the Sith deal in absolutes
Obi Wan Kenobi to Darth Vader
Star Wars III - Revenge of the Sith
Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Self-Reliance, 1841
I gave you life so that you could live it.
Nia Vardalos
Mother to daughter in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding"
May you live all the days of your life.
Jonathan Swift
Mysticism joins and unites; reason divides and separates. People crave belonging more than understanding. Hence, the prominent role of mysticism, and the limited role of reason, in human affairs.
Thomas S. Szasz
Wilcox, L. and George, J. Be Reasonable. Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1994.
Cuisine is both an art and a science: it is an art when it strives to bring about the realization of the true and the beautiful, called le bon (the good) in the order of culinary ideas. As a science, it respects chemistry, physics and natural history. Its axioms are called aphorisms, its theorems recipes, and its philosophy gastronomy.
Lucien Tiendret
SOLO has lit Objectivism on fire.
Julia Duncan Brent
SOLO Exec Loop
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The highwayman does not pretend that he has any rightful claim to your money, or that he intends to use it for your own benefit. He does not pretend to be anything but a robber. He has not acquired impudence enough to profess to be merely a “protector,” and that he takes men's money against their will, merely to enable him to “protect” those infatuated travellers, who feel perfectly able to protect themselves, or do not appreciate his peculiar system of protection. He is too sensible a man to make such professions as these. Furthermore, having taken your money, he leaves you, as you wish him to do. He does not persist in following you on the road, against your will; assuming to be your rightful “sovereign,” on account of the “protection” he affords you. He does not keep “protecting” you, by commanding you to bow down and serve him; by requiring you to do this, and forbidding you to do that; by robbing you of more money as often as he finds it for his interest or pleasure to do so; and by branding you as a rebel, a traitor, and an enemy to your country, and shooting you down without mercy, if you dispute his authority, or resist his demands. He is too much of a gentleman to be guilty of such impostures, and insults, and villainies as these. In short, he does not, in addition to robbing you, attempt to make you either his dupe or his slave.
Lysander Spooner
"No Treason"
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