 ...why is it that the people who worry most about mankind have the least concern for any actual human being?
Adrienne Knowland
Ayn Rand, " Think Twice," The Early Ayn Rand
It's always best on these occasions to do what the mob do..." "But suppose there are two mobs?" suggested Mr. Snodgrass. "Shout with the largest", replied Mr. Pickwick.
Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
Pickwick Papers, 13, 1837
Mobs must be faced if civilization is to be saved.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Preface ("The alternative to Barabbas") to ANDROCLES AND THE LION, 1912
I am persuaded that it is best to move on (and at rate a number of the points I would have made in a lengthier response have already been made by other posters).
Matthew Humphreys
forum post at Solo
It’s time we face the threat of Islam. It’s not just the multi-cultural, politically-correct Left that has this problem; conservatives have a difficulty understanding the threat of this barbaric, unreformed religion.
Jason Pappas
SOLO HQ forum: http://www.solohq.com/Forum/NewsDiscussions/0310.shtml#1
It’s time we face the threat of Islam. It’s not just the multi-cultural politically-correct Left that has this problem; conservatives have a difficulty understand the threat of this barbaric, unreformed religion.
Jason Pappas
SOLO HQ forum: http://www.solohq.com/Forum/NewsDiscussions/0310.shtml#1
"I find war repugnant. All wars. I know war's monstrous aspects: blood and corpses everywhere, hungry refugees, devastated cities, orphans in tears and houses in ruins. I find no beauty in it. But it is with a heavy heart I ask this: what is to be done? Do we have the right not to intervene, when we know what passivity and appeasement will make possible?"
Elie Wiesel
Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Self Reliance (1841)
"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
Kurt Vonnegut
Mother Night
I have many objections to the philosophy of Christ. I do not believe in returning good for evil. I believe in returning justice for evil. I do not believe that I can put a man under a moral obligation to do me a favor by doing him a wrong. The doctrine of non-resistance is to me absurd. The right should be defended and the wrong resisted. Goodness should have the right to protect itself. Neither do I believe in decrying this world. We should not say, "Thou fool," to the man who works for those he loves. Poverty is not a virtue, nor is wealth a crime.
Robert Ingersoll
When you have enough air to breathe, you don't yearn for air. But when breathable air gets to be in short supply, you quickly start noticing how important it is. (Freedom's like that, too.)
Salman Rushdie
Step Across this Line, p. 368
I think men have been done a great disservice, and now, more often than not, they are emasculated for sport.
Jennifer Iannolo
SOLO HQ Forum
Politeness is not necessarily indicative of virtue.
Glenn Lamont
"Conspiracy review", SOLOHQ website
I resent the modern method of never defining ideas, and lumping totally different people into a collective by means of smears and derogatory terms.
Ayn Rand
Interview with Playboy
Now listen to me, goddamnit! The Arabs are simplying buying us! A handful of agas, shahs and emirs who despise this country and everything it stands for -- democracy, freedom, the right for me to get up on television and tell you about it -- a couple of dozen medieval fanatics are going to own where you work, where you live, what you read, what you see, your cars, your bowling alleys, your mortgages, your schools, your churches, your libraries, your kids, your whole life...!
Paddy Chayefsky
Howard Beale, NETWORK
Observe the false dichotomy offered; man's choice is either mindless, "instinctual" copulation - or marriage, an institution presented not as a union of passionate love, but as a relationship of "chaste intimacy", of "special personal friendship", of "discipline proper to purity", of unselfish duty, of alternating bouts with frustration and pregnancy, and of such unspeakable, Grade-B-movie-folks-next-door kind of boredom that any semi-living man would have to run, in self-preservation, to the nearest whorehouse.
Ayn Rand
On Living Death, a speech discussing the 1968 papal encyclical Humanae Vitae.
Whenever a single definite object is made the supreme end of the State, be it the advantage of a class, the safety of the power of the country, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or the support of any speculative idea, the State becomes for the time inevitably absolute.
Lord John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States …
George Orwell
Notes on Nationalism
Human freedom amounts to finding out what the laws of nature let us do and then in acting in concert with those laws to advance our ends.
J. Roger Lee
Limits on Universal Education, quoted from Education in a Free Society (ed. by Tibor Machan)
What does every religion lay claim to? The governance of human passions and of human will. Every religion is a curb, a power, a government. It comes in the name of divine law to subdue human nature. Therefore human liberty is its especial antagonist, which it is its object to vanquish. To this purpose are its mission and hope directed.
Francois-Pierre-Guillaume Guizot
/usr/bin/fortune -o
In the republic of mediocrity, genius is dangerous.
Robert Ingersoll
If we had done as the kings told us five hundred years ago, we should all have been slaves. If we had done as the priests told us, we should all have been idiots. If we had done as the doctors told us, we should all have been dead. We have been saved by disobedience. We have been saved by the splendid thing called independence, and I want to see more of it. I want to see children raised so that they will have it.
Robert Ingersoll
The essence of civlization is the orderly quest for truth, the rational perception of reality and all its facets, and the adaptation of man's behaviour to its laws. So long as we follow the path of reason we shall not move far from the lighted circle of civlization. Its enemies invariably lie among those who, for whatever motive, deny, distort, minimize, exaggerate or poison the truth, and who falsify the process of reason.
Paul Johnson
Enemies of Society
Men are joined by conviction, sundered by opinion.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Establishing lasting peace is the work of education; all politics can do is keep us out of war.
Maria Montessori
We can't expect the American People to jump from Capitalism to Communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving them small doses of Socialism, until they awaken one day to find that they have Communism.
Nikita Kruschev
These are the blessings of Christianity! - Parasitism as the sole practice of the Church; with its ideal of green-sickness, of 'holiness' draining away all blood, all love, all hope for life; the Beyond as the will to deny reality of every kind; the Cross as the badge of recognition for the most subterranean conspiracy there has ever been - a consipiracy against health, beauty, well-constitutedness, bravery, intellect, benevolence of soul, against life itself...
Friedrich Nietzsche
The Anti-Christ
The will to power, as the modern age from Hobbes to Nietzsche understood it, far from being a characteristic of the strong, is, like envy and greed, among the vices of the weak, and possibly even their most dangerous one. Power corrupts indeed when the weak band together in order to ruin the strong, but not before.
Hannah Arendt
The burning of an author's books, imprisonment for opinion's sake, has always been the tribute that an ignorant age pays to the genius of its time.
Joseph Allen
In the fight for liberty, it’s not the “size of the man in the fight” that counts. It’s the “size of the office” that eager oppressors inhabit. In our zeal to procure a “particular man” who is both right and just - to head the administration of a given form of government - let us not lose sight of the much more promising value for us to act to gain or keep: a “particular form of government” which is both right and just.
Edward D. Thompson
Ed Thompson
Science never tells a man how he should act; it merely shows how a man must act if he wants to attain definite ends.
Ludwig von Mises
Human Action, p. 10
IF A NATION VALUES ANYTHING MORE THAN FREEDOM, IT WILL LOSE ITS FREEDOM; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.
W. Somerset Maugham
Frank, Leonard Roy. Freedom. New York: Random House, 2003.
Freedom is a very dangerous thing. Anything else is disastrous.
James Baldwin
Frank, Leonard Roy. Freedom. New York: Random House, 2003.
The individual can never escape the moral burden of his existence. He must choose between obedience to authority and responsibility to himself. Moral decisions are often hard and painful to make. The temptation to delegate this burden to others is therefore ever-present. Yet, as all of history teaches us, those who would take from man his moral burdens--be they priests or warlords, politicians or psychiatrists--must also take from him his liberty and hence his very humanity.
Thomas S. Szasz
Frank, Leonard Roy. Freedom. New York: Random House, 2003.
In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.
Thomas Jefferson
Man once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind.
Thomas Jefferson
However skilled one may be professionally, his abilities amount to nothing when he surrenders the ultimate sovereignty of deciding matters for himself and charting his own course in life. He merely becomes a vessel for others to fill, or a robot to pander to others’ whims at first command.
G. Stolyarov II
To deal with men by force is as impractical as to deal with nature by persuasion.
Ayn Rand
"The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made", PWNI
We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.
John Steinbeck
East of Eden
Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control- these three alone lead to sovereign power.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
...innovation has to some extent been discouraged in the Objectivist movement. I think a lot of people who might have done something have been turned off by the act of getting their work approved or making sure that they were not crossing someone higher up in the movement. That's why I think a hierarchical structure is not a good thing in an intellectual movement.
David Kelley
Interview with Full Context http://rous.redbarn.org/objectivism/Writing/DavidKelley/FullContextInterview.html
I think the marketplace of ideas is very much like the marketplace of goods and services. No one could plan it or predict it.
David Kelley
Interview with Full Context http://rous.redbarn.org/objectivism/Writing/DavidKelley/FullContextInterview.html
The fact that we must initiate and direct the process of thought means that we must not subordinate our judgment of the facts to the minds of others, no matter how numerous; and that the sense of efficacy that is crucial to self-esteem is ours to achieve by our own effort.
David Kelley
Truth and Toleration
... a real movement will not have a single leader. At any given time there will be a number of individuals who distinguish themselves by their work. There will be a dense network of personal relationships and organized groups.
David Kelley
Truth and Toleration
If we assume in advance that anyone who rejects our ideas must be irrational, we have started down the path that turned Marxism and Freudianism into secular religions.
David Kelley
Truth and Toleration
An Objectivist thinker must be a thinker first, an Objectivist second.
David Kelley
Truth and Toleration
When Ayn Rand urged us to check our premises, she never exempted her own.
David Kelley
Truth and Toleration
Suppose an Objectivist philosopher disagrees with Ayn Rand on some particular point. This does not necessarily mean that he rejects her view on all the other principles to which the point in question is logically related. It may well be that he takes the position he does because he regards it as the true implication of those principles.
David Kelley
Truth and Toleration
A literary work is a creation, the concrete embodiment of an idea by a specific author. A philosophy, by contrast, is a body of theoretical knowledge about reality. That is why, as Ayn Rand herself pointed out, a philosophical discovery cannot be copyrighted. The discovery itself, as distinct from a specific text in which it is conveyed, is not the property of the discoverer. Property must be concrete, but a philosophy is a viewpoint that may be held by an open-ended number of people.
David Kelley
Truth and Toleration
I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.
Ayn Rand
The Fountainhead
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