 I have always in my own thought summed up individual liberty, and business liberty, and every other kind of liberty, in the phrase that is common in the sporting world, "A free field and no favor."
Woodrow Wilson
U.S. President, Speech, 1912
Those who tatoo or 'body pierce' themselves or others do so in the belief that an illustrated body compensates an empty mind, and those who wear a headscarf for religious motives or paint scriptural writings on walls, banners and majolicas do so likewise.
Manfred F. Schieder (1937 - )
Any exercise carried on beyond the least amount required to stimulate an optimal increase is not merely a waste of effort, it is actually highly counterproductive.
Mike Mentzer
High-Intensity Training the Mike Mentzer Way by John Little
A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic--on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg--or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was and is the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us.
C.S. Lewis
Mere Christianity
Rand is not going to save you from your insecurities. If you don't move beyond her into creation in the real world you won't go anywhere. You can talk about the "story," but what is the solution? Rappers are better than Objectivists. They are the real capitalists. They don't talk about it. They live it.
Anonymous
Our tax system is fairly complex. And complexity is what makes it work. If Jane Taxpayer figures out she spends more than three months of her year working for Joe Biden, well, she might be annoyed. Fact is she should feel blessed. As our vice president once posited, paying taxes is patriotic. So it's worrisome that fewer and fewer Americans are asked to participate in the ethical work of paying off General Motors' $4.3 billion second-half losses or subsidizing wind farms in Montana.
David Harsanyi
Glory to the Taxpayer
The moonbat motto is: Do as I say, not as I do. Consider the charitable deductions (or lack thereof) of the most sanctimonious liberal politicians: Obama, Biden, Kerry. They throw around quarters - their own, anyway - like they were manhole covers. But they would gladly give you the shirt off somebody else’s back.
Howie Carr
Moonbats wing it when it comes to paying more taxes
A few weeks ago, The New York Times ran an editorial noting the amazing fact that, by the middle of this year, there will be an estimated 6.8 billion people on Earth -- and 5 billion will have cell phones! (Even more astounding, at least one of them is seated directly behind me every time I go to the movies.) How did that happen without a Democrat president and Congress using bribes, parliamentary tricks and arcane non-voting maneuvers to pass a massive, hugely expensive National Cell Phone Reform Act?
Ann Coulter
Prescription For Disaster Now Covered Under Obamacare
If we can not solve all problems in Universe, hell with it, let's get drunk - that's the Russian way. Let's do whatever we can, as much as we can - that's American way. Compare the results - America still wins.
Maria Feht
http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/NewsDiscussions/2788.shtml#19
Here's the thing about monogamy. It only works if you cheat.
Denny Crane
Boston Legal Beauty and the Beast
What happened to Canada? How did the country that gave us Jim Carrey, Mike Myers, Martin Short, Dan Aykroyd and Catherine O'Hara suddenly become a bunch of whining crybabies?
Ann Coulter
Oh, Canada!
The Fedopus has far more than eight tentacles.
Victor Davis Hanson
We’ve Crossed the Rubicon
Nancy Pelosi wants the House to say the Senate bill is 'deemed passed,' so they can pass the bill without voting on it. Can the American people then say that Obama, Biden, Pelosi, and Reid are 'deemed impeached'?
Ron Chandler
from TIA Daily quoted in Pamela Gellar's Atlas Shrugs blog
There is a perfect likeness between Christian and anarchist: their object, their instinct, points only toward destruction.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche and the Nazis
The whole point about homosexuality is that it was supposed to be wilder and crazier, and instead the leftist politicized gays have made homosexuality totally boring. . . . If Oscar Wilde and Cole Porter came back today they'd be straight.
Mark Steyn
ricochet.com
If you think health care is expensive now, just wait until it's free.
P. J. O'Rourke
Scrap the Health-Care Bill!
At the end of the day a traditional Muslim is doing the will of a fanatic, fundamentalist, terrorist God.
Mosab Hassan Yousef
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703915204575103481069258868.html
Government health care is not about health care, it's about government. Once you look at it that way, what the Dems are doing makes perfect sense. For them.
Mark Steyn
Obamacare worth the price to Democrats
We were told that when we had a president, we'd see a giant global political figure - the man that would be the political leader for 500 million people. The man that would represent all of us on the world stage. The man whose job was so important that of course you're paid more than President Obama. Well, I'm afraid what we've got was you. And I'm sorry, but after that performance, earlier, that you gave - and I don't want to be rude - but, you know, really, you have the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk. And the question that I want to ask . . . the question that I want to ask is: Who are you? I'd never heard of you; nobody in Europe has ever heard of you. I would like to ask you, president, who voted for you? And what mechanism? Oh, I know democracy is not popular with you lot . . . and what mechanism do the peoples of Europe have to remove you? Is this European democracy? Well, I sense though that you're competent and capable and dangerous, and I have no doubt that it's your intention to be the quiet assassin of European democracy and of the European nation states. You appear to have a loathing for the very concept of the existence of nation states - perhaps that's because you come from Belgium, which of course is pretty much a non-country. But since you took over, we've seen Greece reduced to nothing more than a protectorate - Sir, you have no legitimacy in this job, at all, and I can say with confidence, that I can speak on behalf of the majority of the British people in saying: We don't know you, we don't want you, and the sooner you're put out to grass, the better
Nigel Farage
British Member of European Parliament tells off the European President
What's happening in the developed world today isn't so very hard to understand: The 20th century Bismarckian welfare state has run out of people to stick it to. In America, the feckless insatiable boobs in Washington, Sacramento, Albany and elsewhere are screwing over our kids and grandkids. In Europe, they've reached the next stage in social democratic evolution: There are no kids or grandkids to screw over.
Mark Steyn
face down in the ouzo
In town halls and tea parties across the nation, Obama lost the argument with Americans. So now he wants a debating partner who will be less challenging: elected Republicans.
Ann Coulter
What Part of "Party of No" Don't You Understand?
When somebody who has never owned a slave apologizes for slavery to somebody who has never been a slave, then what began as mushy thinking has degenerated into theatrical absurdity-- or, worse yet, politics.
Thomas Sowell
Too many apologies
The difference between America and Europe is that, when the global economy nosedived, everywhere from Iceland to Bulgaria mobs took to the streets and besieged Parliament, demanding to know why government didn't do more for them. This is the only country in the developed world where a mass movement took to the streets to say we can do just fine if you control-freak statists would just stay the hell out of our lives, and our pockets.
Mark Steyn
Getting our groupthink on
Obama's NASA budget perfectly captures the difference in spirit between Kennedy's liberalism and Obama's. Kennedy's was an expansive, bold, outward-looking summons. Obama's is a constricted inward-looking call to retreat. Fifty years ago, Kennedy opened the New Frontier. Obama has just shut it.
Charles Krauthammer
Closing the New Frontier
Today's tax system was shaped by sadists who were trying to be nice.
George Will
Charting Our Way to Solvency
Obama . . . has apparently confused what people say with what nations do.
Victor Davis Hanson
America Rides Off Into the Sunset
Functioning societies depend on agreed rules. If you want to open a business, you do it in Singapore or Ireland, because the rules are known to all parties. You don't go to Sudan or Zimbabwe, where the rules are whatever the state's whims happen to be that morning.
Mark Steyn
In Obama's America you'll all work for the government
At its essential level, a political party is an extra-governmental conspiracy to control the government.
Jay Cost
Could Nancy Pelosi Lose Control of the House? RealClearPolitics HorseRaceBlog
I love wealthy people. They've always kept me employed, dry, warm, fed, safe, even entertained. The arrangement is mutually beneficial. My life is pretty much all about me. Who is your life about? Is there a "you" in there, or do you live for everyone else but you?
Teresa Summerlee Isanhart
The Scourge of Public Libraries
Shockingly, half of all Americans have IQs below the median. But intelligence is not the same thing as wisdom or sense. Very intelligent people have been known to advance very compelling arguments on behalf of very bad ideas.
James Taranto
Barack Obama, the Angry Left and the politics of intellectual contempt.
I'd rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president.
Barack Hussein Obama
So who the hell is stopping you,?
Today I voted... And I liked it. As much as I dislike being in MA - at this moment, in this time, I am glad I am here and I was able to vote in this election. For a tiny fraction of an instant, I felt like it might finally make a difference. From the time I knew what he was about - the kind of person Ted Kennedy was, I never though he deserved the privilege of serving the people. I have said it before, and will say it again - I have always felt that people are too willing to rationalize feeling good about voting for that man by constantly reminding us about all the "good" he has done - as if 1) doing the work for the people that put him there in the first place was somehow amazing or heroic and 2) that all that "good" can somehow erase all the bad that he is/was. He left someone to drown, and abused this position of privilege in life to get away with it. For me, today, I cannot deny, was a little bit of putting a stick in Kennedy's eye. I would like to be above that, but I am not. It is icing on the cake that not only could a Republican take this liberal lion (should be something lower than a snake, a snake is too dignified) but that Brown could also be the one to derail the very healtcare bill that Kennedy was fighting for. Of course now I have a new case of TV and news rage - hearing about all the new shennanigans to not seat Brown if he wins, and seek to approve the bill without a vote... I asked my husband last night - where is the outrage?
a Massachusetts Voter
an email from an average person
This isn't the Democratic party of our fathers and grandfathers. This is the party of Woodstock hippies. I was at Woodstock—I built the stage. And when everything fell apart, and people were fighting for peanut-butter sandwiches, it was the National Guard who came in and saved the same people who were protesting them. So when Hillary Clinton a few years ago wanted to build a Woodstock memorial, I said it should be a statue of a National Guardsman feeding a crying hippie.
John "Cliff Claven" Ratzenberger
Cliff Claven for Scott Brown
Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people's money.
Margaret Thatcher
Thames TV This Week Feb 5, 1976
It's not just the money. The notion that the IRS should be able to seize your assets if you don't arrange your health care to the approval of the federal government represents the de facto nationalization of your body, which is about as primal an assault on individual liberty as one could devise.
Mark Steyn
Can Obama hold Teddy's seat?
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Suppose you're reading a novel in which the hero seems to be an individualist, and you have been starved for such a novel. In the first chapter, the hero turns down a very good job, rather than conform to the ideas of others. You feel a strong emotion of admiration and pleasure, and this emotion, quite validly, is important to you. It's the kind of emotion you do want to feel. Well, at this point, you can do one of two things. You can continue to perceive, to see what the book is about, to judge what you've been reading — or you can lose yourself in the pleasure you feel, focus only on it, look only for ways to maintain it, ignoring and evading any evidence that might contradict it. Then, as you continue to read the novel, the hero is shown establishing a socialistic cooperative, which, he says, will once and for all solve the problem of jobs for everyone. Well, if your mind is functioning rationally, you will perceive that you have made a mistake — that is, that whatever this book is preaching it isn't individualism. But, if you've focused on maintaining your emotion at any price, then you'll rationalize it by any means possible. You'll tell yourself that the hero really believes in his ideal, and this makes him an individualist; or that he's fighting for his idea, and this makes him an individualist, so that he's still a hero, et cetera, etc., etc. And you can read the whole book this way, reading into it what you want to find, explaining away what doesn't fit your desires, blinding yourself, destroying your perception for the sake of your emotion. A year later you might read the same book in a different mood and ask yourself, in helpless amazement: "Why did I think what I thought?"
Barbara Branden
"Efficient Thinking" The Vision of Ayn Rand
I am in favor of such laws because, presumably, if there is a court case, somebody has been hurt. And if a witness has knowledge relevant to the issue and he refuses to testify, he is the one who is violating the rights of the defendant, or whomever his testimony involves. If either party in the case needs the information he has, he couldn't have an honest reason for refusing to provide it, because he is interfering with justice. He is saying, in effect, "The court may decide wrongly without me, but I still don't want to testify." I don't think that's legitimate.
Ayn Rand
Raymond Newman Journal On compeling subpoenaed witnesses to testify or face contempt citations, fines and imprisonment
This isn't legislation—it's a suicide bombing. The Democrats are willing to blow themselves up, so long as they can take private, for-profit health care down with them.
Robert Tracinski
The Kamikaze Congress
[T]he problem with the other origin of the “good,” of the good man, as the person of ressentiment has thought it out for himself, demands some conclusion. It is not surprising that the lambs should bear a grudge against the great birds of prey, but that is no reason for blaming the great birds of prey for taking the little lambs. And when the lambs say among themselves, "These birds of prey are evil, and he who least resembles a bird of prey, who is rather its opposite, a lamb,—should he not be good?" then there is nothing to carp with in this ideal's establishment, though the birds of prey may regard it a little mockingly, and maybe say to themselves, "We bear no grudge against them, these good lambs, we even love them: nothing is tastier than a tender lamb
Friedrich Nietzsche
Ressentiment On the Genealogy of Morality
I consider it part of my responsibility as president of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.
Barack Hussein Obama
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-by-the-President-at-Cairo-University-6-04-09/
A case has not been refuted until it has been stated at its strongest.
Christopher Hitchens
The Strange Case of David Irving
Tyranny requires non-objective laws. No matter how severe a form of government you might have, if its laws and edicts are objective, it is not a tyranny.
Ayn Rand
“Objective Law”
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But when the crops fail and the cities rot and the children's teeth decay and nothing works except the ever-enthusiastic and illiterate young lads of the morality police, who will the clerics blame? They are not allowed to blame themselves, except for being insufficiently zealous. Obviously it must be because the Jews, the Crusaders, the Freemasons have been at their customary insidious work. Thus, holy war must be waged on happier and more prosperous lands. If you think I exaggerate even slightly, consult the Web sites of the Iranian theocracy and of its Hamas and Hizbullah surrogates and proxies. These exhorting leaders are not content to inflict their doctrines only on their "own" people. A failed state that cannot allow any grown-up internal debate, or any appeal against the divine edict, will swiftly become an even more failed state and then a rogue one because its limitless paranoia and self-pity must be projected outward. Thus we have a very direct interest in having the Iranian people permitted to interfere in their own internal affairs, and a very immediate reason to insist that the regime's thugs not make their next appearance on the historical stage with nuclear weapons with which to undergird their claim of unfailing righteousness and conviction that they alone know what it is to be a victim.
Christopher Hitchens
As I’ve watched the events of the last few days it is clear once again that President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war. He seems to think if he has a low-key response to an attempt to blow up an airliner and kill hundreds of people, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gives terrorists the rights of Americans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if we bring the mastermind of Sept. 11 to New York, give him a lawyer and trial in civilian court, we won’t be at war. “He seems to think if he closes Guantanamo and releases the hard-core Al Qaeda-trained terrorists still there, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gets rid of the words, ‘war on terror,’ we won’t be at war. But we are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren’t, it makes us less safe. Why doesn’t he want to admit we’re at war? It doesn’t fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office. It doesn’t fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency — social transformation — the restructuring of American society. President Obama’s first object and his highest responsibility must be to defend us against an enemy that knows we are at war.
Vice President Dick Cheney
Our Pretend President
We proclaim that the terrorists "don't represent Islam." OK, whom do they represent? The Franciscans? We don't get to decide what's Islam and what isn't. Muslims do. And far too many of them approve of violent jihad.
Ralph Peters
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/lying_to_ourselves_sjQTP9OuIQIrjE0oaYch2K
We do not have to know everything about something, before knowing anything about it.
Edward D. Thompson
What am I?
For whoever habitually suppresses truth in the name of tact will produce a deformity from the womb of his thought.
Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart
Strategy: Second Revised Edition
A scientist cannot make a false theory true by closing his eyes to the data that contradict it.
Nathaniel Branden
The Vision of Ayn Rand
One does not know a philosophy if ones knows merely its conclusions, but not the reasoning that led to them.
Nathaniel Branden
"The Role of Philosophy" The Vison of Ayn Rand: The Basic Priciples of Objectivism
Ten years from now, we'll be talking about cost overruns of $6 trillion -- but by then, national health care will be an untouchable "third rail" of politics, just as Medicare is now. (Ironically, injuries sustained from actually touching the third rail won't be covered under ObamaCare.)
Ann Coulter
Less Healthcare for More Money
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