 Civilization and profits go hand in hand.
Calvin Coolidge
The yonder is to me a trifling matter. / Should you this world to ruins shatter, / The other then may rise, its place to fill. / 'Tis from this Earth my pleasure springs, / And this sun shines upon my sufferings; / When once I separate me from these things, / Let happen then what can and will. / And furthermore I've no desire to hear / Whether in future too men hate and love, / And whether too in yonder sphere, / There is an under or above.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Faust
By no means! For this earthly sphere / Affords a place for great deeds ever. / Astounding things shall happen here. / I feel the strength for bold endeavour.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Faust
Quark: "It's good to want things." Odo: "Even things you can't have?" Quark: "Especially things you can't have."
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
I think that in trying to understand the socialists, you have confused yourself, which I don't wonder. The truth is that they do not understand themselves. As for Karl Marx, he is the prince of muddleheads
Henry George
With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably.
Star Trek: The Next Generation
Jean Luc Picard quoting Judge Aaron Satie
What would I do with his money if I have to give up my mind in order to get it?
Ayn Rand
Refusing the offer of millions of dollars from an oilman to introduce a religious element to Objectivism.
When Nature forces lengths of thread unending/ In careless whirling on the spindle round,/ When all Life's inharmonic throngs unblending/ In sullen, harsh confusion sound,/ Who parts the changeless series of creation,/ That each, enlivened, moves in rhythmic time?/ Who summons each to join the general ordination,/ In consecrated, noble harmonies to chime?/ Who bids the storm with raging passion lower?/ The sunset with a solemn meaning glow?/ Who scatters Springtime's every lovely flower/ Along the pathway where his love may go?/ Who twines the verdant leaves, unmeaning, slighted,/ Into a wreath of honor, meed of every field?/ Who makes Olympus sure, the gods united?/ The power of Man the Poet has revealed!
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Faust
Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward; they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Impartial observers from other planets would consider ours an utterly bizarre enclave if it were populated by birds, defined as flying animals, that nevertheless rarely or never actually flew. They would also be perplexed if they encountered in our seas, lakes, rivers, and ponds, creatures defined as swimmers that never did any swimming. But they would be even more surprised to encounter a species defined as a thinking animal if, in fact, the creature very rarely indulged in actual thinking.
Steve Allen
There are in fact four very different stumbling blocks in the way of grasping the truth, which hinder every man however learned, and scarcely allow anyone to win a clear title to wisdom, namely, the example of weak and unworthy authority, longstanding custom, the feeling of the ignorant crowd, and the hiding of our own ignorance while making a display of our apparent knowledge.
Roger Bacon
It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.
Giordano Bruno
In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
I am not a noun. I am a verb.
Buckminster Fuller
You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn. You cannot build character by taking away a man's initiative. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.
Abraham Lincoln
A discovery is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind.
Albert Szentgyorgyi
All the courses of my life do show, I am not in the roll of common men.
William Shakespeare
Owain Glyndwr (14th/ early 15th Century Welsh freedom fighter), Henry IV Part 1
"Then again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Self-Reliance
Like the use of the word 'concupiscence' in an earlier age to describe sexual desire, the use of the word 'pollution' to describe essential aspects of the productive activities of an industrial society represents an attempt to defame an entirely proper human capacity by means of using an evil sounding name for it.
George Reisman
Capitalism
Character, in great and little things, means carrying through what you feel able to do.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Rest not! Life is sweeping by; go and dare before you die. Something mighty and sublime, leave behind to conquer time.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The things we do today that we don't have to do will determine where we are and what we are when we can't do anything about what we should have done.
Admiral Grace Hopper
USN, creator of COBOL
The older I get, the more I realize that arguing on the basis of facts and logic only gets you labeled as someone who is out of step with the times, if not lacking in "compassion."
Thomas Sowell
Capitalism Magazine
"There ought to be no laws to guarantee property against the folly of its possessors. In the absence of such laws, capital inherited by a spendthrift will be squandered and re-accumulated in the hands of men who are fit and competent to hold it. So it should be, and under such a state of things there is no reason to desire to limit the property which any man may acquire."
William Graham Sumner
What Social Classes Owe to Each Other
"It is not uncommon to hear a clergyman utter from the pulpit all the old prejudice in favor of the poor and against the rich, while asking the rich to do something for the poor; and the rich comply, without apparently having their feelings hurt at all by the invidious comparison. We all agree that he is a good member of society who works his way up from poverty to wealth, but as soon as he has worked his way up we begin to regard him with suspicion, as a dangerous member of society. A newspaper starts the silly fallacy that “the rich are rich because the poor are industrious,” and it is copied from one end of the country to the other as if it were a brilliant apothegm."
William Graham Sumner
What Social Classes Owe to Each Other
The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable, for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit.
Jonathan Swift
Gold is absolute objectivity. It is blind like justice. It has no politics and ideology, no likes or dislikes, no friends or enemies. All it recognizes is its possessor, whom it serves faithfully so long as he has it.
Charles de Gaulle
The fanatic is not really a stickler to principle. He embraces a cause not primarily because of its justness or holiness but because of his desperate need for something to hold onto.
Eric Hoffer
I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.
Isaac Asimov
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
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
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
When Ayn Rand urged us to check our premises, she never exempted her own.
David Kelley
Truth and Toleration
An Objectivist thinker must be a thinker first, an Objectivist second.
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
... 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
Objectivists have too often relied on stereotypical formulations of Ayn Rand's ideas. They have been quick to pounce on thinkers who might have been their allies. They have greeted new extensions of the system with a timid caution that reminds me of the Council of Scholars in Anthem, who spent fifty years debating the wisdom of accepting that radical innovation, the candle.
David Kelley
Truth and Toleration
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
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
...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
Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control- these three alone lead to sovereign power.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
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
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
Rather than attempting to regulate people, the government should declare a moratorium on rain. I promise that it will be just as effective as any other policy the government is currently undertaking.
G. Stolyarov II
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
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
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
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.
Freedom is a very dangerous thing. Anything else is disastrous.
James Baldwin
Frank, Leonard Roy. Freedom. New York: Random House, 2003.
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.
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