 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
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
Thus, music becomes what Theodor W. Adorno might call a negative dialectic of original unoriginality, allowing the seeming banality of impoverished invention to serve as a vessel for the lamentations of the outcast. By reducing other people's masterworks to cheap ditties, Horner shakes his fist at the suffocating weight of bourgeois culture. In the absence of an individual voice, we are given to perceive the destruction of individuality itself. That’s one explanation. The other is that the man is a hack.
Alex (the music critic for The New Yorker) Ross
"The Score for Troy"
The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'
Ronald Reagan
I've noticed that everyone who is for abortion has already been born.
Ronald Reagan
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
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
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
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
Establishing lasting peace is the work of education; all politics can do is keep us out of war.
Maria Montessori
Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build bridges even when there are no rivers.
Nikita Kruschev
Men are joined by conviction, sundered by opinion.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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
There is in a man an upwelling spring of life, energy, love, whatever you like to call it. If a course is not cut for it, it turns the ground round it into a swamp.
Mark Rutherford
Shanahan, John M. The Most Brilliant Thoughts of All Time (In Two Lines or Less). New York: HarperCollins, 1999
Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Shanahan John M. The Most Brilliant Thoughts of All Time (In Two Lines or Less). New York: HarperCollins, 1999.
When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Shanahan John M. The Most Brilliant Thoughts of All Time (In Two Lines or Less). New York: HarperCollins, 1999.
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
An open mind is like an open wound: easily infected and subject to rot.
James Hetfield, Metallica
In the republic of mediocrity, genius is dangerous.
Robert Ingersoll
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
We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.
Aesop (ca. 550 BC)
Whitman William B. The Quotable Politician. Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2003.
A liberal is a man who is willing to spend somebody else's money.
Carter Glass (former senator of Virginia)
Whitman, William B. The Quotable Politician. Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2003.
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)
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
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
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.
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
We have rights, as individuals, to give as much of our own money as we please to charity; but as members of Congress we have no right to appropriate a dollar of public money.
David Crockett, Congressman 1827-35
http://www.jim.com/liberquo.htm
I cannot undertake to lay my finger on the article of the Constitution which grants a right to Congress of expending, on the objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.
James Madison
http://www.civicsandpolitics.com/tenth.html
The great conflict of the 21st century will not be between the West and terrorism. Terrorism is a tactic, not a belief. The true battle will be between modern civilization and anti-modernists; between those who believe in the primacy of the individual and those who believe that human beings owe their allegiance and identity to a higher authority; between those who give priority to life in this world and those who believe that human life is mere preparation for an existence beyond life; between those who believe in science, reason, and logic and those who believe that truth is revealed through Scripture and religious dogma. Terrorism will disrupt and destroy lives. But terrorism itself is not the greatest danger we face.
Robert B. Reich
http://www.nationalreview.com/ponnuru/ponnuru200407060831.asp
If you are not free to choose wrongly and irresponsibly, you are not free at all.
Jacob Hornberger
A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body.
John Stuart Mill
Freedom, morality, and the human dignity of the individual consists precisely in this; that he does good not because he is forced to do so, but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it.
Mikhail Bakunin
Any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave
H. L. Mencken
The tyranny of the multitude is a multiplied tyranny.
Edmund Burke
Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.
Frederick Douglass
We cannot prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all before us, and with just as much reason. On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.
James Bovard
In 1968, on Christmas Eve, the astronauts completing a loop around the moon and coming to see the earth before them were overcome by a 'spontaneous manifestation of religious awe' and began to read the King James version of the Holy Bible and to pray. Many people were stunned by that -- and the American Atheist community was much concerned. [We learned that the] Bible readings and the prayers were printed in the flight plan [and were] carefully pre-planned for many weeks. ... [We] found out that the entire prayer business had been carefully pre-planned for months ahead in Washington, DC [and] had even been code named 'Experiment P-1'. ... We decided to take it to court for it was obviously government sponsoring of religion. ... No scientist, no civil liberties organization, no university, no Humanist, Ethical Culturalist, Rationalist, or Secularist supported us in any action. The single person to come out publicly to sustain our position was Ayn Rand.
Madalyn Murray O'Hair
From the October 1970 issue of the Society of Separationists Newsletter, reprinted in the April 2004 issue of American Atheists Newsletter
I'll be back. I'm not afraid. Not afraid whatsoever.
Martha Stewart
After her sentencing today (July 16, 2004)
We are ahead of our time, and, hopefully, we have all our time ahead of us.
G. Stolyarov II
Remark to a Fellow Advocate of Immortality
The most intractable problem for contemporary philosophers to overcome is to learn how and when to sacrifice precision for accuracy (when the goal is to think well, nothing is more vital than accuracy).
Edward D. Thompson
Where's the challenge in living life with a safety net?
Paul Hibbert
Excerpted from a dialogue with himself.
The best government is self-government.
Thomas Jefferson
Conformity is deformity.
G. Stolyarov II
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
"I am the Howard Roark of writing."
G. Stolyarov II
SOLOHQ Forum
Politeness is not necessarily indicative of virtue.
Glenn Lamont
"Conspiracy review", SOLOHQ website
The rational argumentator will tolerate dissent and divergence from his position, though he will still seek to actively engage it; he will never ostracize another individual from his company for the mere fact of such dissent.
G. Stolyarov II
The Mark of the Fanatic http://www.geocities.com/rational_argumentator/fanatic.html
Of all ignorance, the ignorance of the educated is the most dangerous. Not only are educated people likely to have more influence, they are the last people to suspect that they don't know what they are talking about when they go outside their narrow fields.
Thomas Sowell
http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=3856
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