 I'm the type who needs to know. I didn't ask to be this way, but that's how it is. I am simply not capable of adjusting my whole existence to accommodate something that must be accepted on faith, on the word of people I've never met, people who've been dead for thousands of years. I can't live like that. It's not me.
F. Paul Wilson
The Haunted Air: A Repairman Jack Novel
Innocence is its own defense.
Benjamin Franklin
Poor Richard's Almanac, 1733
It took Chuck and me at least two hours of hard climbing to reach the top of the [Great Pyramid]. ... As the sun came up and we could hear the desert and the city below, I experienced one of the most incredible feelings I've ever had -- that feeling I so often describe as the 'peak of aliveness.' ... In life, it is possible to lose your money, your home, or your spouse, but the memories, the excitement, and the emotions associated with the accomplishment of any of your dreams can never be taken away from you.
Charles Givens
SuperSelf
You can't reason with a cold hard wind, all you can do is not let it in.
Jules Shear and Steve Booker
Cold Hard Wind
Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar.
Random Internet E-Mail prankster
It is contended by many that ours is a Christian government, founded upon the Bible, and that all who look upon the book as false or foolish are destroying the foundation of our country. The truth is, our government is not founded upon the rights of gods, but upon the rights of men. Our Constitution was framed, not to declare and uphold the deity of Christ, but the sacredness of humanity. Ours is the first government made by the people and for the people. It is the only nation with which the gods have had nothing to do. And yet there are some judges dishonest and cowardly enough to solemnly decide that this is a Christian country, and that our free institutions are based upon the infamous laws of Jehovah.
Robert Ingersoll
Individuality, 1873
My beloved nation is filled with flaws, errors and outright stupidities, and I will always strive against those. But Ed, there is no equivalency between the flawed West, and the primitive tyrannies; it's not close, it’s not even in the same fucking ballpark. Stop providing the moral sanction that the low life cowards and anti-Americans of LewRockwell and others use. They are beneath contempt, and to treat them with anything other than total contempt, is a betrayal of the good.
George Cordero
To a Saddamite, 'Who's Better Off?' thread, April 11, 2005
You lot, you spend all your time thinking about dying, like you're going to get killed by eggs, or beef, or global warming, or asteroids. But you never take time to imagine the impossible. Maybe you survive.
The Doctor
The End of the World (Doctor Who, Season 27, Episode 2)
No man deserves his freedom or his life who does not daily win them anew
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Faust
I love iconoclastic thinking. I love to be intellectually provoked, to have to rethink my assumptions on almost anything. One either strengthens old convictions, by seeing them survive attack, or modifies old convictions and 'grows.'
Joseph H. Friedman, M.D.
Philosophy will clip an angel's wings, conquer all mysteries by rule and line, empty the haunted air, the gnomed mine.
John Keats
Lamia
Fools multiply folly.
Benjamin Franklin
Poor Richard's Almanac
When reason preaches, if you won't hear her she'll box your ears.
Benjamin Franklin
Poor Richard's Almanac, 1753
I was never opposed to the draft
Noam Chomsky
http://blog.zmag.org/index.php/weblog/entry/the_draft/
There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.
Ansel Adams
Vice knows she's ugly, so puts on her mask.
Benjamin Franklin
Poor Richard's Almanac, 1746
As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.
William Blake
Isn't it beautiful? Isn't it sublime? Isn't it simple? I have solved the problem. Now I can die happy. But I must live, I must return to work and build the motor so I can give it to the world. No more will men be slaves to hard tasks. My motor will set them free, it will do the work of the world.
Nikola Tesla
Upon inventing the AC induction motor, February 1882
The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.
Dante Alighieri
You see you can't please ev'ryone so you got to please yourself.
Ricky Nelson
Garden Party
There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.
Johann Sebastian Bach
If you knew how much work went into it, you wouldn't call it genius.
Michelangelo
"The Lord works in mysterious ways."
Kallin
Waukesha (Wisconsin) County supervisor Andrew Kallin after a shooting rampage at a local church left seven dead.
Reading makes a full man, meditation a profound man, discourse a clear man.
Benjamin Franklin
Poor Richard's Almanac, 1738
Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.
Thomas Edison
"Problems loom large, when men don't." (Quoted in Reader's Digest)
Robert James Bidinotto
Robert James Bidinotto
If you don't like the pictures in our store, please just stay home. It's as simple as that.
Paul Marciano
Chairman of Guess clothes company responding to American Family Association complaints about Paris Hilton photos in Guess' stores. Quoted on SuperBeauty.org
Today's mighty oak is just yesterday's nut that held its ground.
Anonymous
A disagreement that does not challenge fundamentals serves only to reinforce them.
Ayn Rand
"The Establishing of an Establishment", Philosophy: Who Needs It
If you wou'd not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing.
Benjamin Franklin
Poor Richard's Almanac, 1738
I'd rather be a failure at something I love than a success at something I hate.
George Burns
These dynamos and turbines of the Niagara Falls Power Company impressed me far more profoundly than the Cave of the Winds; are indeed, to my mind, greater and more beautiful than accidental eddying of air beside a downpour. They are will made visible, thought translated into easy and commanding things. They are clean, noiseless, starkly powerful. All the clatter and tumult of the early age of machinery is past and gone here; there is no smoke, no coal grit, no dirt at all. The wheel pit into which one descends has an almost cloistered quiet about its softly humming turbines. These are altogether noble masses of machinery, huge black slumbering monsters, great sleeping tops that engineer irresistible forces in their sleep…. A man goes to and fro quietly in the long, clean hall of the dynamos. There is no clangor, no racket…. All these great things are as silent, as wonderfully made, as the heart in a living body, and stouter and stronger than that…. I fell into a daydream of the coming power of men, and how that power may be used by them.
H.G. Wells
Upon seeing the first great Niagara Falls power plant, which was created by Westinghouse and Tesla, among others.
I think Ayn is right about a lot of things. Her respect for personal achievement, for one. Her opposition to the welfare state, or much of it, for another. But one mustn't say that. You have to throw welfare programs at people -- like throwing meat to a pack of wolves -- even if the programs don't accomplish their alleged purpose and even if they're morally wrong. Because otherwise they'll kill you. The masses. They hate intelligence. They're envious of ability. They resent wealth. You've got to throw them something so they'll let us live.
Bennett Cerf (owner, Random House Publishing, 1957)
My Years With Ayn Rand, by Nathaniel Branden
Where carcasses are, eagles will gather, and where good laws are, much people flock thither.
Benjamin Franklin
Poor Richard's Almanac, 1734
To avoid criticism do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.
Elbert Hubbard
Man's eminence is to be seen in the fact that he chooses between alternatives. He regulates his behavior deliberately. He can master his impulses and desires; he has the power to suppress wishes, the satisfaction of which would force him to renounce the attainment of more important goals. In short: man acts; he purposively aims at ends chosen. This is what we have in mind in stating that man is a moral person, responsible for his conduct.
Ludwig von Mises
Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans
John Winston Ono Lennon
John Lennon, Beautiful Boy
Be sure you're right, then go ahead.
David Crockett, Congressman 1827-35
Every man should use the intellect...as the lighthouse uses its lamps, that those afar off on the sea may see the shining, and learn their way.
Henry Ward Beecher
I'm afraid I place a certain value on my life, which prevents my being wholeheartedly concerned with the fate of the world."
Odkin
Wallace Wood, The Wizard King Trilogy, Book One: The King of the World
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
Mark Twain
I like a man who grins when he fights.
Winston Churchill
In brightest day, in blackest night, no evil shall escape my sight! Let those who worship evil's might, beware my power.. Green Lantern's light!
Green Lantern
1943, credited to Alfred Bester
Prostitution is the abortion of romance.
Newberry
Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death.
Rosalind Russell
as Mame Dennis in Auntie Mame
There should be no subject about which you cannot make jokes.
Rowan Aktinkson
In the post-election climate, reason needs to be defended from the right-wing "moral values" zealots; but it also needs to be defended from the left-wing fearmongers who act as if we were one executive order away from a Taliban-like theocracy.
Cathy Young
"Dumb and Dumberer," Reason Online, http://www.reason.com/cy/cy112304.shtml
Now there's another thing I want you to remember. I don't want to get any messages saying that we are holding our position. We're not holding anything. Let the Hun do that. We are advancing constantly and we're not interested in holding onto anything except the enemy. We're going to hold onto him by the nose and we're going to kick him in the ass. We're going to kick the hell out of him all the time and we're going to go through him like crap through a goose.
George S. Patton
George C. Scott as PATTON
According to the dominant voices of her press, America, too, has a vanguard of young rebels, dissenters and fighters for freedom. Marching down the aisle of a theater, they shout their protest to the world: "I cannot travel without a passport!... I am not allowed to smoke marijuana!... I am not allowed to take my clothes off!"
Ayn Rand
The "Inexplicable Personal Alchemy"
First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.
Rev, Martin Niemoller
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