| 485 | Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.-Frederic Bastiat |
| 484 | Prices are important not because money is considered paramount but because prices are a fast and effective conveyor of information through a vast society in which fragmented knowledge must be coordinated.-Thomas Sowell |
| 483 | Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread.-Thomas Jefferson |
| 482 | No nation was ever ruined by trade, even seemingly the most disadvantageous.-Benjamin Franklin |
| 481 | No Free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms.-Thomas Jefferson |
| 480 | Those now possessing weapons and ammunition are at once to turn them over to the local police authority. Firearms and ammunition found in a Jew\'s possession will be forfeited to the government without compensation ... Whoever willfully or negligently violates the provisions ... will be punished with imprisonment and a fine.-Nazi Law, Regulations Against Jews\' Possession of Weapons, 11 Nov 1938, German Minister of the Interior |
| 478 | In western civilization, the period ruled by mysticism is known as the 'Dark Ages' and the 'Middle Ages'. I will assume that you know the nature of that period and the state of human existence in those ages. The Renaissance broke the rules of the mystics. "Renaissance" means the "rebirth". Few people today will care to remind you that it was a rebirth of reason - of man's mind.-Ayn Rand |
| 477 | The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see.-Ayn Rand |
| 476 | Contrary to the ecologists, nature does not stand still and does not maintain the kind of "equilibrium" that guarantees the survival of any particular species - least of all the survival of her greatest and most fragile product: man.-Ayn Rand |
| 475 | Neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as a man is free to attempt to survive by any random means, as a parasite, a moocher or a looter, but not free to succeed at it beyond the range of the moment - so he is free to seek his happiness in any irrational fraud, any whim, any delusion, any mindless escape from reality, but not free to succeed at it beyond the range of the moment not to escape the consequences.-Ayn Rand |
| 474 | Just as man's physical existence was liberated when he grasped that 'nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed', so his consciousness will be liberated when grasps that nature, to be apprehended, must be obeyed - that the rules of cognition must be derived from the nature of existence and the nature, the identity, of his cognitive faculty.-Ayn Rand |
| 472 | It is the metaphysically given that must be accepted: it cannot be changed. It is the man-made that must never be accepted uncritically: it must be judged, then accepted or rejected and changed when necessary.-Ayn Rand |
| 471 | One's own independent judgment is the means by which one must choose one's actions, but it is not a moral criterion nor a moral validation; only reference to a demonstrable principle can validate one's choices.-Ayn Rand |
| 470 | Words are a lens to focus one’s mind.-Ayn Rand |
| 469 | And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride. This god, this one word: "I."-Ayn Rand |
| 468 | America's abundance was not created by public sacrifices to the common good, but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes.-Ayn Rand |
| 467 | To preserve one's mind intact through a modern college education is a test of courage and endurance, but the battle is worth it and the stakes are the highest possible to man: the survival of reason. {from "The Comprachicos"}-Ayn Rand |
| 466 | Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision.-Ayn Rand |
| 465 | I made my fortune by being able to spot a certain kind of man.-Ayn Rand |
| 464 | Whether you know the shape of a pebble or the structure of a solar system, the axioms remain the same: that it exists and that you know it.-Ayn Rand |
| 463 | The men who are not interested in philosophy need it most urgently; they are most helplessly in its power.-Ayn Rand |
| 462 | The desire not to be anything is the desire not to be.-Ayn Rand |
| 461 | No one's happiness but my own is in my power to achieve or to destroy.-Ayn Rand |
| 460 | All work is an act of philosophy.-Ayn Rand |
| 459 | We cannot fight against anything, unless we fight for something -- and what we must fight for is the supremacy of reason, and a view of man as a rational being.-Ayn Rand |
| 458 | I'm working to improve my methods, and every hour I save is an hour added to my life.-Ayn Rand |
| 457 | A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race - and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin.-Ayn Rand |
| 456 | Just as life is an end in itself, so every living human being is an end in himself, not the means to the ends or the welfare of others - and, therefore, man must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself.-Ayn Rand |
| 455 | The best verse hasn't been rhymed yet, The best house hasn't been planned, The highest peak hasn't been climbed yet, The mightiest rivers aren't spanned; Don't worry and fret, faint-hearted, The chances have just begun For the best jobs haven't been started, The best work hasn't been done. -Berton Braley |
| 454 | To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT... In little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million human deaths, due to malaria, that otherwise would have been inevitable-National Academy of Sciences, Committee on Research in the Life Sciences of the Committee on Science and Public Policy. 1970 |
| 453 | An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.-Robert A. Heinlein |
| 452 | A long and wicked life followed by five minutes of perfect grace gets you into Heaven. An equally long life of decent living and good works followed by one outburst of taking the name of the Lord in vain - then have a heart attack at that moment and be damned for eternity. Is that the system? -Robert A. Heinlein |
| 451 | When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how holy the motives. -Robert A. Heinlein |
| 450 | To be matter-of-fact about the world is to blunder into fantasy - and dull fantasy at that, as the real world is strange and wonderful. -Robert A. Heinlein |
| 449 | Theology is never any help; it is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn't there. Theologians can persuade themselves of anything. -Robert A. Heinlein |
| 448 | Never insult anyone by accident.-Robert A. Heinlein |
| 447 | I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.-Robert A. Heinlein |
| 446 | Don't handicap your children by making their lives easy-Robert A. Heinlein |
| 445 | Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors... and miss. -Robert A. Heinlein |
| 444 | Beware of altruism. It is based on self-deception, the root of all evil.-Robert Heinlein |
| 443 | It is not justice or equal treatment that you grant to men when you abstain equally from praising men's virtues and from condemning men's vices. When your impartial attitude declares, in effect, that neither the good nor the evil may expect anything from you - whom do you betray and whom do you encourage?-Ayn Rand |
| 442 | ...observe that in all the propaganda of the ecologists—amidst all their appeals to nature and pleas for 'harmony with nature'—there is no discussion of man's needs and the requirements of his survival. Man is treated as if he were an unnatural phenomenon. Man cannot survive in the kind of state of nature that the ecologists envision—i.e., on the level of sea urchins or polar bears...-Ayn Rand |
| 441 | An Asian peasant who labors through all of his waking hours, with tools created in Biblical times—a South American aborigine who is devoured by piranha in a jungle stream—an African who is bitten by the tsetse fly—an Arab whose teeth are green with decay in his mouth—these do live with their 'natural environment,' but are scarcely able to appreciate its beauty. Try to tell a Chinese mother, whose child is dying of cholera: 'Should one do everything one can? Of course not.' Try to tell a Russian housewife, who trudges miles on foot in sub-zero weather in order to spend hours standing in line at a state store dispensing food rations, that America is defiled by shopping centers, expressways and family cars.-Ayn Rand |
| 440 | Justice does exist in the world, whether people choose to practice it or not. The men of ability are being avenged. The avenger is reality. Its weapon is slow, silent, invisible, and men perceive it only by its consequences - by the gutted ruins and the moans of agony it leaves in its wake. The name of the weapon is: *inflation*.-Ayn Rand |
| 438 | Since time immemorial and pre-industrial, 'greed' has been the accusation hurled at the rich by the concrete-bound illiterates who were unable to conceive of the source of wealth or of the motivation of those who produce it.-Ayn Rand |
| 437 | When "the common good" of a society is regarded as something apart from and superior to the individual good of its members, it means that the good of *some* men takes precedence over the good of others, with those others consigned to the status of sacrificial animals.-Ayn Rand |
| 436 | Inflation is not caused by the actions of private citizens, but *by the government*: by an artificial expansion of the money supply required to support deficit spending. No private embezzlers or bank robbers in history have ever plundered people's savings on a scale comparable to the plunder perpetrated by the fiscal policies of statist governments.-Ayn Rand |
| 435 | To the extent that a man is guided by his rational judgment, he acts in accordance with the requirements of his nature and, to that extent, succeeds in achieving a human form of survival and well-being; to the extent that he acts irrationally, he acts as his own destroyer.-Ayn Rand |
| 434 | Competition is a by-product of productive work, *not* its goal. A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, *not* by the desire to beat others.-Ayn Rand |
| 433 | Contrary to the ecologists, nature does not stand still and does not maintain the kind of "equilibrium" that guarantees the survival of any particular species - least of all the survival of her greatest and most fragile product: man.-Ayn Rand |
| 432 | Poverty is not a mortgage on the labor of others - misfortune is not a mortgage on achievement - failure is not a mortgage on success - suffering is not a claim check, and its relief is not the goal of existence - man is not a sacrificial animal on anyone's altar nor for anyone's cause - life is not one huge hospital.-Ayn Rand |
| 431 | I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!-Barry Goldwater |
| 430 | Determine never to be idle...It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.-Thomas Jefferson |
| 429 | In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.-Thomas Jefferson |
| 428 | I believe in God, only I spell it Nature-Frank Lloyd Wright |
| 427 | Noble life demands a noble architecture for noble uses of noble men. Lack of culture means what it has always meant: ignoble civilization and therefore imminent downfall.-Frank Lloyd Wright |
| 426 | I protest against the use of infinite magnitude as something completed, which in mathematics is never permissible. Infinity is merely a facon de parler, the real meaning being a limit which certain ratios approach indefinitely near, while others are permitted to increase without retriction.-Carl Friedrich Gauss |
| 425 | From the beginning of time, whenever a king has lain dangerously ill, the priesthood and some part of the nation have prayed in unison that the king be spared to his grieving and anxious people (in case they were grieving and anxious, which was not usually the rule) and in no instance was their prayer ever answered. When Mr. Garfield lay near to death, the physicians and surgeons knew that nothing could save him, yet at an appointed signal all the pulpits in the United States broke forth with one simultaneous and supplicating appeal for the President's restoration to health. They did this with the same old innocent confidence with which the primeval savage had prayed to his imaginary devils to spare his perishing chief -- for that day will never come when facts and experience can teach a pulpit anything useful. Of course the President died, just the same.-Mark Twain |
| 414 | If devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.-Ayn Rand |
| 411 | Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries.-Ayn Rand |
| 410 | Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual). -Ayn Rand |
| 409 | A desire presupposes the possibility of action to achieve it; action presupposes a goal which is worth achieving. -Ayn Rand |
| 408 | They proclaim that every man is entitled to exist without labor and, the laws of reality to the contrary notwithstanding, is entitled to receive his "minimum sustenance" his food, his clothes, his shelter, with no effort on his part, as his due and his birthright. To receive it, from whom? -Ayn Rand |
| 407 | The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive. -Robert A. Heinlein |
| 406 | Never insult anyone by accident. -Robert A. Heinlein |
| 405 | One man's theology is another man's belly laugh-Robert A. Heinlein |
| 404 | One man's "magic" is another man's engineering. "Supernatural" is a null word.-Robert A. Heinlein |
| 403 | Of all the strange "crimes" that human beings have legislated of nothing, "blasphemy" is the most amazing - with "obscenity" and "indecent exposure" fighting it out for the second and third place. -Robert A. Heinlein |
| 402 | No statement should be believed because it is made by an authority. -Robert A. Heinlein |
| 401 | Never underestimate the power of human stupidity. -Robert A. Heinlein |
| 400 | I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do. -Robert A. Heinlein |
| 399 | Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors... and miss. -Robert A. Heinlein |
| 398 | A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity. -Robert A. Heinlein |
| 397 | Political tags - such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth - are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. -Robert A. Heinlein |
| 396 | Love your country, but never trust its government.-Robert A. Heinlein |
| 395 | The taxpayer -- that's someone who works for the federal government but doesn't have to take the civil service examination.-Ronald Reagan |
| 394 | All serious conversations gravitate towards philosophy.-Ernest Dimnet |
| 393 | Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.-H. L. Mencken |
| 392 | The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.-Norman Mailer |
| 391 | The difference between death and taxes is death doesn't get worse every time Congress meets.-Will Rogers |
| 390 | Rightful liberty is unobstructed action, according to our will, within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others.-Thomas Jefferson |
| 389 | The politician attempts to remedy the evil by increasing the very thing that caused the evil in the first place: legal plunder.-Frederick Bastiat |
| 388 | The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.-Thomas Jefferson |
| 387 | ...You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer...-Abraham Lincoln |
| 386 | For every new mouth to feed, there are two hands to produce.-Peter T. Bauer |
| 385 | Since there is no such entity as 'the public,' since the public is merely a number of individuals, the idea that 'the public interest' supersedes private interests and rights can have but one meaning: that the interests and rights of some individuals take precedence over the interests and rights of others.-Ayn Rand |
| 384 | It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.-Sir Winston Churchill |
| 383 | Philosophy studies the fundamental nature of existence, of man, and of man's relationship to existence. … In the realm of cognition, the special sciences are the trees, but philosophy is the soil which makes the forest possible.-Ayn Rand |
| 382 | I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows. -Ayn Rand |
| 380 | Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!-Patrick Henry |
| 379 | I can say - not as a patriotic bromide, but with full knowledge of the necessary metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, political, and aesthetic roots - that the United States of America is the greatest, the noblest and, in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world.-Ayn Rand |
| 378 | To save the world is the simplest thing in the world. All one has to do is think.-Leonard Peikoff |
| 377 | A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.-Ayn Rand |
| 376 | [The proud man] does not demand of himself the impossible, but he does demand every ounce of the possible. He refuses to rest content with a defective soul, shrugging in self-deprecation 'That's me.' He knows that that 'me' was created, and is alterable, by him.-Leonard Peikoff |
| 375 | We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.-H.L. Mencken |
| 373 | Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.-George Washington |
| 372 | Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think.-Ayn Rand |
| 371 | I have never needed any other tool than reason, and I trust I never shall.-Thomas Paine |
| 370 | Love, friendship, respect, admiration are the emotional response of one man to the virtues of another, the spiritual payment given in exchange for the personal, selfish pleasure which one man derives from the virtues of another man's character. Only a brute or an altruist would claim that the appreciation of another person's virtues is an act of selflessness, that as far as one's own selfish interest and pleasure are concerned, it makes no difference whether one deals with a genius or a fool, whether one meets a hero or a thug, whether one marries an ideal woman or a slut.-Ayn Rand |
| 369 | God... a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive.-Ayn Rand |
| 367 | Existence exists — and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists.-Ayn Rand |
| 365 | 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 |
| 364 | In the temple of his spirit, each man is alone.-Ayn Rand |
| 363 | Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is the highest political end-Lort Acton |
| 362 | You can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.-Robert Heinlein |
| 361 | The public be damned!-Cornelius Vanderbilt |
| 360 | I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction-Ayn Rand |
| 359 | "I have never been able to conceive how any rational being could propose happiness to himself from the exercise of power over others.-Thomas Jefferson |
| 358 | Thought does not bow to authority. -Ayn Rand |
| 357 | The unexamined life is not worth living-Socrates |
| 356 | I am a man who does not exist for others.-Howard Roark, The Fountainhead |
| 354 | I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul-William Ernest Henly |
| 353 | You have power over your mind -- not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength. It is in your power to return to life.-Marcus Aurelius |
| 351 | If you want to live a happy life, throw out the thought, "How will this seem to others?" Simply live according to your principles.-Marcus Aurelius |
| 345 | Honor that which is the best in yourself.-Marcus Aurelius |
| 344 | O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation's ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced. -Frederick Douglass |
| 343 | I shall choose friends among men, but neither slaves nor masters. And I shall choose only such as please me, and them I shall love and respect, but neither command nor obey. And we shall join our hands when we wish, or walk alone when we so desire.-Ayn Rand |
| 340 | Nobody respects an altruist, neither in private life nor in international affairs. An altruist is a person who keeps sacrificing himself and his values, which means: sacrificing his friends to his enemies, his allies to his protagonists, his interests to any cry for help, his strength to anyone's weakness, his convictions to anyone's wishes, the truth to any lie, the good to any evil.-Ayn Rand |
| 339 | Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason.-Ayn Rand |
| 338 | There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.-Ayn Rand |
| 337 | Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.-Lord Acton |
| 336 | Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.-Ronald Reagan |
| 335 | It had been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience had proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.-Alexander Hamilton |
| 334 | Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.-John Adams |
| 333 | There is nothing so likely to produce peace as to be well prepared to meet the enemy.-George Washington |
| 332 | The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.-Thomas Sowell |
| 331 | How do you tell a Communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an Anti-communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin.-Ronald Reagan |
| 330 | Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.-Thomas Sowell |
| 329 | What they have to discover, what all the efforts of capitalism's enemies are frantically aimed at hiding, is the fact that capitalism is not merely the 'practical,' but the only moral system in history.-Ayn Rand |
| 328 | It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow citizens.-Adam Smith |
| 327 | One of the worst fallacies in the field of economics - propagated by Karl Marx and accepted by almost everyone today, including many businessmen - is the notion that the development of monopolies in an inescapable and intrinsic result of the operation of a free, unregulated economy. In fact, the exact opposite is true. It is a free market that makes monopolies impossible.-Nathanial Branden |
| 326 | In a capitalist society, all human relationships are voluntary. Men are free to cooperate or not, to deal with one another or not, as their own individual judgments, convictions and interests dictate.-Ayn Rand |
| 325 | A gun is not an argument.-Ayn Rand |
| 324 | Whenever the legsilators endeavour to take away and destroy the power of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience..-John Locke |
| 323 | Government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of an advance auction of stolen goods.-H.L. Mencken |
| 322 | I guard my treasures: my thought, my will, my freedom. And the greatest of these is freedom.-Ayn Rand |
| 321 | Most bad government comes from too much government-Thomas Jefferson |
| 320 | As soon as government management begins it upsets the natural equilibrium of industrial relations, and each interference only requires further bureaucratic control until the end is the tyranny of the totalitarian state.-Adam Smith |
| 319 | A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.-Barry Goldwater |
| 318 | The ideal government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone.-H.L. Mencken |
| 317 | Civilisation is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilisation is the process of setting men free from men.-Ayn Rand |
| 316 | He [King George III] has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.-United States Declaration of Independence |
| 315 | What counts alone is the innovator, the dissenter, the harbinger of things unheard of, the man who rejects the traditional standards and aims at substituting new values and ideas for old ones.-Ludwig von Mises |
| 314 | All socialism involves slavery.-Herbert Spencer |
| 313 | Which nations are the happiest, most moral and most peaceful? Those among which the law intervenes least in private activity.-Frederic Bastiat |
| 312 | No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent-Abraham Lincoln |
| 311 | The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow.-Ayn Rand |
| 310 | It is futile to fight against, if one does not know what one is fighting for.-Ayn Rand |
| 309 | Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others.-Ayn Rand |
| 308 | My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.-Ayn Rand |
| 307 | I can accept anything, except what seems to be the easiest for most people: the half-way, the almost, the just-about, the in-between.-Ayn Rand |
| 306 | Whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man's nature and of life's potential-Ayn Rand |
| 305 | The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.-Ayn Rand |
| 304 | The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it.-Ayn Rand |
| 303 | I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.-Ayn Rand |
| 302 | Anything that won't sell, I don't want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success.-Thomas Edison |
| 301 | [Socialists and anarchists] are the stench today in the nostrils of all honest men and women. They are a poison; and I would have them go and colonize and live out their theories and eat one another up; for they produce nothing and they subsist as suckers on what honest men, frugal and industrious, produce.-John D. Rockfeller |
| 300 | A pleasant natural environment is a good - a luxury good, philosophical good, a moral goody-good, a good time for all. Whatever, we want it. If we want something, we should pay for it, with our labor or our cash. We shouldn't beg it, steal it, sit around wishing for it, or euchre the government into taking it by force.-PJ O'Rourke |
| 299 | Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs.-John Davis, editor of Earth First Journal |
| 298 | How many examples do we have of these bodies [of the state] set up to eliminate a problem, actually eliminating it, shutting down their operations and going home?-Gregory Sams |
| 297 | I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!-Barry Goldwater, 1964 |
| 296 | The great curse of the 20th century was the inability of decent people to realize that what was unthinkable to them was both thinkable and doable by others -- like Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. Are we to wait until Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction and we wake up some morning to find a couple of American cities obliterated?-Thomas Sowell |
| 295 | It is self-destructive for any society to create a situation where a baby who is born into the world today automatically has pre-existing grievances against another baby born at the same time, because of what their ancestors did centuries ago. It is hard enough to solve our own problems, without trying to solve our ancestors' problems.-Thomas Sowell |
| 294 | It is bad enough that so many people believe things without any evidence. What is worse is that some people have no conception of evidence and regard facts as just someone else's opinion.-Thomas Sowell |
| 292 | That something happened to you is of no importance to anyone, not even to you. The important thing about you is what you choose to make happen - your values and choices. That which happened by accident - what family you were born into, in what country, and where you went to school - is totally unimportant.-Ayn Rand |
| 291 | The purpose of all art is the objectification of values.-Ayn Rand |
| 290 | To discuss evil in a manner implying neutrality, is to sanction it.-Ayn Rand |
| 289 | It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there's someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.-Ayn Rand |
| 288 | Pity for the guilty is treason to the innocent.-Ayn Rand |
| 286 | Even if smog were a risk to human life, we must remember that life in nature, without technology, is wholesale death.-Ayn Rand |
| 279 | By the same principle, the government may not give special leniency to the perpetrator of a crime, on the grounds of the nature of his ideas.-Ayn Rand |
| 270 | Businessmen are the one group that distinguishes capitalism and the American way of life from the totalitarian statism that is swallowing the rest of the world. All the other social groups- workers, farmers, professional men, scientists, soldiers- exist under dictatorships, even though they exist in chains, in terror, in misery, and in progressive self-destruction. But there is no such group as businessmen under a dictatorship. Their place is taken by armed thugs: by bureaucrats and commissars. Businessmen are the symbol of a free society- the symbol of America.-Ayn Rand |
| 268 | Ask yourself why totalitarian dictatorships find it necessary to pour money and effort into propaganda for their own helpless, chained, gagged slaves, who have no means of protest or defense. The answer is that even the humblest peasant or the lowest savage would rise in blind rebellion, were he to realize that he is being immolated, not to some incomprehensible noble purpose, but to plain, naked human evil.-Ayn Rand |
| 267 | To deal with men by force is as impractical as to deal with nature by persuasion.-Ayn Rand |
| 262 | America's abundance was created not by public sacrifices to the common good, but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America's industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages, and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance- and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way.-Ayn Rand |
| 261 | There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. When there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.-Ayn Rand |
| 258 | Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lot of an empty mind.-Ayn Rand |
| 257 | Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where the gun begins.-Ayn Rand |
| 254 | The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who remain neutral in time of great moral crisis.-Dante Alighieri (from the Divine Comedy) |
| 253 | We are currently in the midst of a complex and difficult political campaign. I call on the Western democracies and primarily on the leader of the free world, the United States: Do not repeat the dreadful mistake of 1938, when enlightened European democracies decided to sacrifice Czechoslovakia for a convenient temporary solution. Do not try to appease the Arabs at our expense. This is unacceptable to us. Israel will not be Czechoslovakia. Israel will fight terrorism.-Ariel Sharon, Prime Minister of Israel |
| 252 | We should be conscious of the superiority of our civilization, which consists of a value system that has given people widespread prosperity in those countries that embrace it, and guarantees respect for human rights and religion.-Silvio Berlusconi, Italian Prime Minister |
| 251 | ...no weapon in any arsenal is as formidable as the will and the moral courage of free men and free women.-Donald Rumsfeld |
| 250 | To those who oppose war, I ask: If not now, when? How many more corpses are necessary before this country should take action?-Dr. Leonard Peikoff |
| 249 | All the reasons which made the initiation of physical force evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative.-Ayn Rand |
| 247 | Those who forget the lessons of history, are doomed to repeat them.-Santa Anna |
| 246 | Half the truth is sometimes the greater lie.-Benjamin Franklin |
| 244 | I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.-Thomas Jefferson |
| 243 | When Hitler attacked the Jews I was not a Jew, therefore, I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the Catholics, I was not a Catholic, and therefore, I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the unions and the industrialists, I was not a member of the unions and I was not concerned. Then, Hitler attacked me and the Protestant church - and there was nobody left to be concerned.-Martin Niemoller |
| 238 | I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.-Galileo Galilei |
| 229 | Every coercive monopoly was created by government intervention into the economy: by special privileges, such as franchises or subsidies, which closed the entry of competitors into a given field, by legislative action.-Ayn Rand |
| 228 | If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose- because it contains all the others- the fact that they were the people who created the phrase to make money. No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity- to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created.-Ayn Rand |
| 227 | So you think that money is the root of all evil? Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal wlth one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?-Ayn Rand |
| 226 | I have come here to say that I do not recognize anyone's right to one minute of my life....It had to be said. The world is perishishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.-Ayn Rand |
| 219 | The precept: Judge not, that ye be not judged ... is an abdication of moral responsibility: it is a moral blank check one gives to others in exchange for a moral blank check one expects for oneself.-Ayn Rand |
| 214 | The Middle Ages were an era of mysticism, ruled by blind faith and blind obedience to the dogma that faith is superior to reason. The Renaissance was specifically the rebirth of reason, the liberation of man's mind, the triumph of rationality over mysticism - a faltering, incomplete, but impassioned triumph that led to the birth of science, of individualism, of freedom.-Ayn Rand |
| 212 | Do you believe in God, Andrei?No.Neither do I. But that's a favorite question of mine. An upside-down question, you know.What do you mean?Well, if I asked people whether they believed in life, they'd never understand what I meant. It's a bad question. It can mean so much that it really means nothing. So I ask them if they believe in God. And if they say they do--then, I know they don't believe in life.Why?Because, you see, God--whatever anyone chooses to call God--is one's highest conception of the highest possible. And whoever places his highest conception above his own possibility thinks very little of himself and his life. It's a rare gift, you know, to feel reverence for your own life and to want the best, the greatest, the highest possible, here, now, for your very own.-Ayn Rand |
| 208 | There can be no such thing as a political crime under the American system of law. Since an individual has the right to hold and to propagate any ideas he chooses (obviously including political ideas), the government may not infringe his right; it may neither penalize nor reward him for his ideas; it may not take any judicial cognizance whatever of his ideology.By the same principle, the government may not give special leniency to the perpetrator of a crime, on the grounds of the nature of his ideas.-Ayn Rand |
| 207 | It is a grave error to suppose that a dictatorship rules a nation by means of strict, rigid laws which are obeyed and enforced with rigorous, military precision. Such a rule would be evil, but almost bearable; men could endure the harshest edicts, provided these edicts were known, specific and stable; it is not the known that breaks men's spirits, but the unpredictable. A dictatorship has to be capricious; it has to rule by means of the unexpected, the incomprehensible, the wantonly irrational; it has to deal not in death, but in sudden death; a state of chronic uncertainty is what men are psychologically unable to bear.-Ayn Rand |
| 203 | The moral cannibalism of all hedonist and altruist doctrines lies in the premise that the happiness of one man necessitates the injury of another.-Ayn Rand |
| 202 | Volumes can be and have been written about the issue of freedom versus dictatorship, but, in essence, it comes down to a single question: do you consider it moral to treat men as sacrificial animals and to rule them by physical force?-Ayn Rand |
| 193 | Thinking men cannot be ruled.-Ayn Rand |
| 191 | To save the world is the simplest thing in the world. All one has to do is think.-Leonard Peikoff |
| 190 | The framers gave us the Second Amendment not so we could go deer or duck hunting but to give us a modicum of protection against congressional tyranny.-Walter Williams |
| 189 | A tyrant...is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.-Plato |
| 187 | The main political problem is how to prevent the police power from becoming tyrannical. This is the meaning of all the struggles for liberty.-Ludwig Von Mises |
| 186 | It is not conclusive proof of a doctrine's correctness that its adversaries use the police, the hangman, and violent mobs to fight it. But it is a proof of the fact that those taking recourse to violent oppression are in their subconsciousness convinced of the untenability of their own doctrines.-Ludwig Von Mises |
| 185 | The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it's good-by to the Bill of Rights.-H.L. Mencken |
| 184 | When the people have no tyrant, their own public opinion becomes one.-Lord Lytton |
| 183 | Tyranny and despotism can be exercised by many, more rigourously, more vigourously, and more severely, than by one.-Andrew Johnson |
| 182 | Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like spirits at the dawn of day.-Thomas Jefferson |
| 181 | They [the clergy] believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition of their schemes. And they believe rightly: for I have sworn upon the altar of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.-Thomas Jefferson |
| 180 | Absolute power corrupts even when exercised for humane purposes. The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep.-Eric Hoffer |
| 178 | Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny.-Robert Heinlein |
| 176 | It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery.-Benjamin Disraeli |
| 173 | Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.-Edmund Burke |
| 172 | The tyranny of the multitude is a multiplied tyranny.-Edmund Burke |
| 171 | Any excuse will serve a tyrant.-Aesop |
| 170 | Men have been taught that it is a virtue to agree with others. But the creator is the man who disagrees. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to swim with the current. But the creator is the man who goes against the current. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to stand together. But the creator is the man who stands alone.-Ayn Rand |
| 169 | Men have been taught that the highest virtue is not to achieve, but to give. Yet one cannot give that which has not been created. Creation comes before distribution- or there will be nothing to distribute. The need of the creator comes before the need of any possible beneficiary. Yet we are taught to admire the second-hander who dispenses gifts he has not produced above the man who made the gifts possible. We praise an act of charity. We shrug at an act of achievement.-Ayn Rand |
| 168 | The basic need of the creator is independence. The reasoning mind cannot work under any form of compulsion. It cannot be curbed, sacrificed or subordinated to any consideration whatsoever. It demands total independence in function and in motive. To a creator, all relations with men are secondary.-Ayn Rand |
| 167 | In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it's yours.-Ayn Rand |
| 166 | Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life-Ayn Rand |
| 165 | To love is to value. Only a rationally selfish man, a man of self-esteem, is capable of love - because he is the only man capable of holding firm, consistent, uncompromising, unbetrayed values. The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone-Ayn Rand |
| 163 | Unjust laws have to be fought ideologically; they cannot be fought or corrected by means of mere disobedience and futile martyrdom.-Ayn Rand |
| 162 | Man's character is the product of his premises.-Ayn Rand |
| 161 | All the problems of the world could be settled easily if men were only willing to think. The trouble is that men very often resort to all sorts of devices in order not to think, because thinking is such hard work.-Thomas J. Watson |
| 160 | It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.-Voltaire |
| 159 | Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.-Mark Twain |
| 158 | Always acknowledge a fault. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you an opportunity to commit more.-Mark Twain |
| 157 | It does not do you good to leave a dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.-J.R.R. Tolkien |
| 156 | No dictator, no invader, can hold an imprisoned population by force of arms forever. There is no greater power in the universe than the need for freedom. Against that power, governments and tyrants and armies cannot stand. The Centauri learned this lesson once. We will teach it to them again. Though it take a thousand years, we will be free.-J. Michael Straczynski |
| 155 | This I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must must try to destroy the free mind, for this is one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts.-John Ernst Steinbeck |
| 154 | Many a man would rather you heard his story than granted his request.-Philip Stanhope |
| 153 | There is only one principle of war and that's this. Hit the other fellow, as quickly as you can, as hard as you can, where it hurts him most, when he ain't lookin'. - Sir William Slim- |
| 152 | People are always blaming circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them.-George Bernard Shaw |
| 151 | In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time someting like that happened in politics or religion.-Carl Sagan |
| 150 | Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, Thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought is great and swift and free.-Bertrand Russell |
| 149 | It is not the critic who counts, nor the person who points out how the strong person stumbled or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the person who is actually in the arena; whose face is actually marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again, who knows great enthusiasm and great devotions, whose life is spent in a worthy cause; who, at best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and at worst, if failure wins out, it at least wins with greatness, so that this person's place shall never be with those timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.-Theodore Roosevelt |
| 148 | Diplomacy is the art of saying 'nice doggy' until you can find a rock.-Will Rogers |
| 147 | Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.-Will Rogers |
| 146 | Courage is fear holding on a minute longer.-General George S. Patton |
| 145 | Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom.-General George S. Patton |
| 144 | Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habits. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.-Patrick Overton |
| 142 | Making fun of born-again Christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high powered rifle and scope.-P. J. O'Rourke |
| 141 | There is no squabbling so violent as between people who accept an idea yesterday, and those who will accept the same idea tomorrow.-Christopher Morley |
| 140 | Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not yet understood.-Henry Miller |
| 139 | If you want to truly understand something, try to change it.-Kurt Lewin |
| 138 | We promise according to our hopes, and perform according to our fears.-La Rochefourauld |
| 137 | Rarely do we find men who willingly to engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.-Martin L. King, Jr |
| 136 | Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature.-Helen Keller |
| 135 | Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.-Erica Jong |
| 134 | One man with courage makes a majority.-Andrew Jackson |
| 133 | Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.-Aldous Huxley |
| 132 | There is one thing stronger than all the armies of the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.-Victor Hugo |
| 131 | The true test of intelligence is not how much we know how to do, but how we behave when we don't know what to do.-John Holt |
| 130 | Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimension.-Oliver Wendell Holmes |
| 129 | You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.-Eric Hoffer |
| 128 | When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.-Eric Hoffer |
| 127 | In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.-Eric Hoffer |
| 125 | The vision must be followed by the venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps -- We must step up the stairs. --Vance Havner |
| 124 | Men give me credit for some genius. All the genius I have lies in this; when I have a subject in hand, I study it profoundly. Day and night it is before me. My mind becomes pervaded with it. Then the effort that I have made is what people are pleased to call the fruit of genius. It is the fruit of labor and thought.-Alexander Hamilton |
| 123 | You miss 100% of the shots you never take.-Wayne Gretsky |
| 122 | One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.-Andr‚ Gide |
| 121 | We all sit around in a ring and suppose, while the secret sits in the center and knows.-Robert Frost |
| 120 | A liberal is man too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel.-Robert Frost |
| 118 | I am looking for a lot of men who have an infinite capacity to not know what can't be done.-Henry Ford |
| 117 | Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason so few engage in it.-Henry Ford |
| 116 | What lies behind us and lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us.-Ralph Waldo Emerson |
| 115 | Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life.-Ralph Waldo Emerson |
| 114 | A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.-Dwight D. Eisenhower |
| 113 | You cannot solve current problems with current thinking. Current problems are the result of current thinking.-Albert Einstein |
| 112 | If there is not struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both moral and physical - but it must be a struggle.-Frederick Douglas |
| 111 | Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.-Arthur C. Clarke |
| 110 | Nothing is as real as a dream. The world can change around you, but your dream will not. Your life may change, but your dream doesn?t have to. Responsibilities need not erase it. Duties need not obscure it. Your family and friends need not get in its way, because the dream is within you. No one can take it away.-Tom Clancey |
| 109 | Men occasionally stumble on the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.-Sir Winston Churchill |
| 108 | Before you start on the road of revenge, dig two graves.-Chinese proverb |
| 107 | Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves.-Lord Byron |
| 106 | If you keep doing what you've always done, you will keep getting what you've always gotten.-Jenine Bucker |
| 104 | The lion and the calf shall lie down together but the calf won't get much sleep.-Woody Allen |
| 103 | A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.-Herm Albright |
| 102 | In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.-Ayn Rand |
| 101 | I swear by my life, and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.-Ayn Rand |
| 100 | A leash is only a rope with a noose on both ends.-Ayn Rand |
| 99 | The moral precept to adopt...is: Judge, and be prepared to be judged.-Ayn Rand |
| 98 | There is no escape from the fact that men have to make choices; so long as men have to make choices, there is no escape from moral values; so long as moral values are at stake, no moral neutrality is possible. To abstain from condemning a torturer, is to become an accessory to the torture and murder of his victims.-Ayn Rand |
| 97 | The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.-Ayn Rand |
| 96 | Loyalty is like rubber: one can stretch it so far and then - it snaps.-Ayn Rand |
| 95 | To rest one's case on faith means to concede that reason is on the side of one's enemies- that one has no rational arguments to offer.-Ayn Rand |
| 94 | Politics is based on three other philosophical disciplines: metaphysics, epistemology and ethics- on a theory of man's nature and of man's relationship to existence. It is only on such a base that one can formulate a consistent political theory and achieve it in practice. When, however, men attempt to rush into politics without such a base, the result is that embarrassing conglomeration of impotence, futility, inconsistency and superficiality which is loosely designated today as conservatism.-Ayn Rand |
| 93 | may the God you invented forgive you!-Ayn Rand |
| 92 | A crime is the violation of the right(s) of other men by force (or fraud). It is only the initiation of physical force against others- i.e., the recourse to violence- that can be classified as a crime in a free society (as distinguished from a civil wrong). Ideas, in a free society, are not a crime- and neither can they serve as the justification of a crime.-Ayn Rand |
| 91 | Today, when a concerted effort is made to obliterate this point, it cannot be repeated too often that the Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals- that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government- that it is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizen's protection against the government.-Ayn Rand |
| 90 | Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation's troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen.-Ayn Rand |
| 89 | The right of a nation to determine its own form of government does not include the right to establish a slave society (that is, to legalize the enslavement of some men by others). There is no such thing as the right to enslave. A nation can do it, just as a man can become a criminal- but neither can do it by right.-Ayn Rand |
| 88 | There are four characteristics which brand a country unmistakably as a dictatorship: one-party rule- executions without trial or with a mock trial, for political offenses- the nationalization or expropriation of private property- and censorship. A country guilty of these outrages forfeits any moral prerogatives, any claim to national rights or sovereignty, and becomes an outlaw.-Ayn Rand |
| 87 | There can be no such thing as a political crime under the American system of law. Since an individual has the right to hold and to propagate any ideas he chooses (obviously including political ideas), the government may not infringe his right; it may neither penalize nor reward him for his ideas; it may not take any judicial cognizance whatever of his ideology. By the same principle, the government may not give special leniency to the perpetrator of a crime, on the grounds of the nature of his ideas.-Ayn Rand |
| 86 | There is nothing to take a man's freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers.-Ayn Rand |
| 85 | Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.-Ayn Rand |
| 84 | There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.-Ayn Rand |
| 83 | The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.-Ayn Rand |
| 82 | The right to agree with others is not a problem in any society; it is the right to disagree that is crucial. It is the institution of private property that protects and implements the right to disagree...-Ayn Rand |
| 81 | Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).-Ayn Rand |
| 80 | Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.-Ayn Rand |
| 79 | There can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob.-Ayn Rand |
| 78 | One can not be a traitor to anything, except to oneself.-Ayn Rand |
| 77 | Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration.-Ayn Rand |
| 76 | To know one's own desires, their meaning and their costs requires the highest human virtue: rationality.-Ayn Rand |
| 75 | The only purpose of education is to teach a student how to live his life-by developing his mind and equipping him to deal with reality. The training he needs is theoretical, i.e., conceptual. He has to be taught to think, to understand, to integrate, to prove. He has to be taught the essentials of the knowledge discovered in the past-and he has to be equipped to acquire further knowledge by his own effort.-Ayn Rand |
| 74 | Man cannot survive except by gaining knowledge, and reason is his only means to gain it. Reason is the faculty that perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by his senses. The task of his senses is to give him the evidence of existence, but the task of identifying it belongs to his reason, his senses tell him only that something is, but what it is must be learned by his mind.-Ayn Rand |
| 73 | The action required to sustain human life is primarily intellectual: everything man needs has to be discovered by his mind and produced by his effort.-Ayn Rand |
| 72 | Aristotle may be regarded as the cultural barometer of Western history. Whenever his influence dominated the scene, it paved the way for one of history's brilliant eras; whenever it fell, so did mankind.-Ayn Rand |
| 71 | When personal judgement is inoperative (or forbidden), men's first concern is not how to choose, but how to justify their choice.-Ayn Rand |
| 70 | The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life.-Ayn Rand |
| 69 | No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the sum of his knowledge.-Ayn Rand |
| 68 | There are only two means by which men can deal with one another: guns or logic. Force or persuasion. Those who know that they cannot win by means of logic, have always resorted to guns.-Ayn Rand |
| 67 | To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one's thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one's mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.-Ayn Rand |
| 66 | To fear to face an issue is to believe the worst is true.-Ayn Rand |
| 65 | An inventor is a man who asks 'Why?' of the universe and lets nothing stand between the answer and his mind.-Ayn Rand |
| 63 | If you wish to prosper, let your customer prosper. When people have learned this lesson, everyone will seek his individual welfare in the general welfare. Then jealousies between man and man, city and city, province and province, nation and nation, will no longer trouble the world.-Frederic Bastiat |
| 62 | The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence... The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, and to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law.-Ayn Rand |
| 61 | Do not make the mistake...of thinking that a worker is a slave and that he holds his job by his employer's permission. He does not hold it by permission - but by contract, that is, by a voluntary mutual agreement. A worker can quit his job; a slave cannot.-Ayn Rand, Textbook of Americanism |
| 60 | Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.-Jeff Burroughs |
| 59 | O, it is excellent To have a giant's strength! But it is tyrannous To use it like a giant.-William Shakespeare |
| 57 | Necessity is the plea of every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.-William Pitt |
| 56 | The framers gave us the Second Amendment not so we could go deer or duck hunting but to give us a modicum of protection against congressional tyranny.-Walter Williams |
| 55 | The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.-Thomas Jefferson |
| 54 | There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.-Robert Heinlein |
| 53 | The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.-Robert Heinlein |
| 52 | In America, it is indispensable that every well wisher of true liberty should understand that acts of tyranny can only proceed from the public. The public, then, is to be watched, in this country, as, in other countries kings and aristocrats are to be watched.-James Fenimore Cooper |
| 51 | It makes no difference whether government controls allegedly favor the interests of labor or business, of the poor or the rich, of a special class or a special race: the results are the same. The notion that a dictatorship can benefit any one social group at the expense of others is a worn remnant of the Marxist mythology of class warfare, refuted by half a century of factual evidence. All men are victims and losers under a dictatorship; nobody wins-except the ruling clique.-Ayn Rand |
| 50 | A little government and a little luck are necessary in life; but only a fool trusts either of them.-P.J. O'Rourke |
| 49 | It should be remembered as an axiom of eternal truth in politics, that whatever power in any government is independent, is absolute also; in theory only at first while the spirit of the people is up, but in practice as fast as that relaxes.-Thomas Jefferson |
| 48 | It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.-Thomas Jefferson |
| 47 | The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.-Thomas Jefferson |
| 46 | Governments will always misuse the machinery of the law as far as the state of public opinion permits.-Emile Capouya |
| 45 | The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments.-William H. Borah |
| 44 | The state is the great fiction by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everybody else.-Frederic Bastiat |
| 43 | A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.-Edward Abbey |
| 42 | The essential characteristic of Western civilization that distinguishes it from the arrested and petrified civilizations of the East was and is its concern for freedom from the state. The history of the West, from the age of the Greek polis down to the present-day resistance to socialism, is essentially the history of the fight for liberty against the encroachments of the officeholders.-Ludwig Von Mises |
| 41 | Bad monetary and fiscal policy, often designed by the IMF, is the real cause of global problems. The only explanation for why government leaders continue to follow these policies is that by blaming markets, they avoid blaming themselves.-Brian S. Wesbury |
| 40 | The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.-Thomas Sowell |
| 39 | Whoever claims that economic competition represents 'survival of the fittest' in the sense of the law of the jungle, provides the clearest possible evidence of his lack of knowledge of economics.-George Reisman |
| 38 | Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman's tool is values; the bureaucrat's tool is fear.-Ayn Rand |
| 37 | There are two methods, or means, and only two, whereby man's needs and desires can be satisfied. One is the production and exchange of wealth; this is the economic means. The other is the uncompensated appropriation of wealth produced by others; this is the political means.-Albert Jay Nock |
| 36 | If an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.-Milton Friedman |
| 35 | As the science of economics...exploded the fallacies of every brand of utopianism, it was outlawed and stigmatized as unscientific.-Ludwig Von Mises |
| 33 | Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.-Milton Friedman |
| 32 | Some see private enterprise as a predatory target to be shot, others as a cow to be milked, but few are those who see it as a sturdy horse pulling the wagon.-Winston Churchill |
| 31 | The first condition for the establishment of perpetual peace is the general adoption of the principles of laissez-faire capitalism.-Ludwig Von Mises |
| 30 | The meaning of economic freedom is this: that the individual is in a position to choose the way in which he wants to integrate himself into the totality of society.-Ludwig Von Mises |
| 29 | All people, however fanatical they may be in their zeal to disparage and to fight capitalism, implicitly pay homage to it by passionately clamoring for the products it turns out.-Ludwig Von Mises |
| 28 | Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence. True friendship is a plant of slow grow, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation.-George Washington |
| 27 | Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man or order of men-Adam Smith |
| 25 | They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.-Benjamin Franklin |
| 23 | We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.-Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence |
| 22 | When I say capitalism, I mean a full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez faire capitalism, with a separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.-Ayn Rand |
| 21 | Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. ...And among these rights are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness-Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence |
| 20 | I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it-Voltaire |
| 19 | No arsenal or no weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women-Ronald Reagan |
| 18 | Poverty and Suffering are not due to unequal distribution of goods and resources, but to the unequal distribution of capitalism-Rush Limbaugh |
| 17 | There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.-Albert Einstein |
| 16 | Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.-Albert Einstein |
| 15 | It is unbecoming for young men to utter maxims.-Aristotle |
| 14 | Wise men make proverbs, but fools repeat them.-Samuel Palmer |
| 13 | Wit is educated insolence.-Aristotle |
| 12 | Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.-Henry Ford |
| 11 | I'll sleep when I'm dead.-Warren Zevon |
| 10 | If a man does his best, what else is there?-General George S. Patton |
| 8 | I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.-Thomas Jefferson |
| 7 | Rights are moral principles which define and protect a man's freedom of action,but impose no obligation on other men.-Ayn Rand |
| 6 | Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values.-Ayn Rand |
| 5 | Men have been taught that the ego is the synonym of evil, and selflessness the ideal of virtue. But the creator is the egoist in the absolute sense, and the selfless man is the one who does not think, feel, judge or act. These are function of the self.-Ayn Rand |
| 4 | Honor is self-esteem made visible in action.-Ayn Rand |
| 3 | To love is to value. Only a rationally selfish man, a man of self-esteem, is capable of love - because he is the only man capable of holding firm, consistent, uncompromising, unbetrayed values. The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone.-Ayn Rand |
| 2 | Anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today.-Ayn Rand |
| 1 | The law giver, of all beings, most owes the law allegiance. He of all men should behave as though the law compelled him. But it is the universal weakness of mankind that what we are given to administer we presently imagine we own.-H.G. Wells |