"A public figure is often condemned for an action that is taken unfairly out of context but nevertheless reflects, in a compelling and encapsulated manner, an underlying truth about that person."

Marti Hearst

"The truth is always more interesting that your preconception of what it might be."

Steven Levy

"Scientists are as vigorous in complaining about the incomprehensibility of others' scientific papers as they are lazy in clarifying their own."

Philip Campbell

"If you don't have a solid example then your theory is not a good theory."

Rodney Brooks

"The people sensible enough to give good advice are usually sensible enough to give none."

Eden Phillpotts

"In some cases, a man's sense of life is better (closer to the truth) than the kind of ideas he accepts. In other cases, his sense of life is much worse than the ideas he professes to accept but is unable fully to practice. Ironically enough, it is man's emotions, in such cases, that act as the avengers of his neglected or betrayed intellect."

Ayn Rand

"...intellectual agnosticism is, in reality, very close to cowardice. The agnostic who claims that his is the more courageous course, that it is easy to jump to a conclusion but hard to keep one's head and 'see clearly' despite the mists of passion and prejudice--this man is deceiving himself. It is, on the contrary, easy to reflect on the complexity and many-sidedness of the issues that confront one, and to conclude that no man is capable of seeing the whole truth. What is hard is to hold the evidence clearly in mind and keep it there, persistently turning it over and integrating it until the conclusion emerges."

James J. Gibson

"What people demand at an artificially low price exceeds what other people will supply at such prices."

Thomas Sowell

"An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it."

Anonymous

"Opportunities are never lost; someone will take the ones you miss."

Unknown

"Atheism isn't a thing at all; it's just the absence of a particular form of error. The positive is the recognition of and commitment to reason."

Harry Binswanger, HBL

"Don't bother to examine a folly; instead ask yourself what it accomplishes."

Ayn Rand

"If you have a right to respect, that means other people don't have a right to their own opinions."

Thomas Sowell

"Facts can be ignored but their consequences cannot be escaped. If the facts don't matter, this means that the people who are going to have to pay those consequences don't matter."

Thomas Sowell

"If you get people asking the wrong questions, you don't have to worry about the answers."

Hunter Thompson

"You work for the improvement of mankind, secure in the knowledge that one six-billionth of that improvement will be yours to revel in."

Harry Binswanger describing utilitarianism, HBL

"The steps of a man sound heavier when he is alone in the hall."

Louis L'Amour as Mathurin Kerbouchard in The Walking Drum

"The whole purpose of having laws is to keep the evil corporations from eating our children."

slashdot user justinburt

"Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms."

Robert Anson Heinlein as Jean V. Debois, Starship Troopers

"I've been hearing all my life about the Serious Philosophical Issues posed by life extension, and my attitude has always been that I'm willing to grapple with those issues for as many centuries as it takes."

Patrick Nielsen Hayden

"The political left seems to regard economic policy issues as litmus tests for whether you are a good person, rather than as questions of facts about what works and doesn't work."

Thomas Sowell

"Seek simplicity, but distrust it."

A.N. Whitehead

"It was he who had willed it, it was he who had made it; he had thrust it into his own heart, and at this hour, looking upon it, he might have the same satisfaction that an armorer would have, who should recognize his own mark upon a blade, on withdrawing it all reeking from his breast."

Victor Hugo about Jean Valjean, Les Miserables

"A fiery desire should develop in everybody to be in one's quest for knowledge full of a strong consuming fire, ever offering oneself as the first sacrifice to the truth one recognizes."

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzche

"All it takes for evil to thrive is for good men and women to do nothing."

Police Recruitment Billboard

"Cost is the value of the foregone option."

Unknown

"Economizing is attaining the highest valued ends with the least valued means."

Unknown

"My suspicion has now become very great: in everything that I hear I feel contempt for me.--E.g., most recently in a letter from Rohde. I could swear that, were it not for the accident of our former friendly relationship, he would now condemn me and my goals in the most disdainful manner."

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Whoever wishes to keep a secret must hide the fact that he possesses one."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Mountains cannot be surmounted except by winding paths."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"If a good person does you wrong, act as though you had not noticed it. They will make note of this and not remain in your debt long."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"All truly wise thoughts have been thoughts already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"modesty, n.: Being comfortable that others will discover your greatness."

Unknown

"If it were a game, the rules would be defined, the moves to victory comprehensible. Games made sense. 'Kill monster, find jewel, earn bonus points.' Not much like real life, maybe, but who wanted real life? No rules, no goals, and no idea even of where to begin."

Tad Williams, Otherland

"Man is a still deeper depth than the people."

Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

"The relaxed mind cannot lead a severe life."

Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

"Those are rare who fall without being degraded."

Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

"There is nothing so easy but that it becomes difficult when you do it reluctantly."

Publius Terentius Afer (Terence)

"The good man ought to be a lover of self, since he will then act nobly, and so benefit himself and aid his fellows; but the bad man ought not to be a lover of self, since he will follow his base passions, and so injure both himself and his neighbours."

Aristotle

"The goal of humanity cannot lie in the end, but only in its highest specimens."

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"In man creator and creature are united. Your pity is for the 'creature in man,' for that which must be formed, broken, forged, torn, burned, and purged--for that which necessarily must and shall suffer. And our pity--do you not grasp for whom our converse pity is, when it protests against your pity as against the worst of all pamperings and weaknesses?"

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"The pitying one rarely understands the 'whole inner sequence' and the 'entire economy of the soul': 'he wants to help and does not realize that there is a personal necessity of suffering'."

Walter Kaufmann explaining Nietzshe's thoughts, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist

"The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in hardness against themseleves and others, in experiments. Their joy is self-conquest. Difficult tasks are a priviledge to them; to play with burdens that crush others, a recreation. They are the most venerable kind of man: that does not preclude their being the most cheerful and the kindliest."

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Man would sooner have the Void for his purpose than be void of Purpose."

Friedrich Nietzsche

"Nirvana is not ultimate happiness but a substitute desired by some of the weak who are incapable of achieving that state of joyous power which they, too, would prefer if they had the strength to attain it."

Walter Kaufmann explaining Nietzshe's thoughts, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist

"One must never ask whether the truth will be useful or whether it may become one's fatality."

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"When he has said that, his disciple shouted...: 'But I believe in your cause and consider it so strong that I shall say everything, everything that I can find in my heart to say against it.' The innovator laughed...: 'This kind of discipleship,' he said then, 'is the best...'"

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"One repays a teacher badly if one always remains a pupil only."

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"For once to pose questions here with a hammer and perhaps to hear as a reply that famous hollow sound... what a delight for one who has ears behind his ears."

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"To question, to tremble with the craving and the joy of questioning [...] this feeling is the first thing I seek in everyone: some foolishness persuades me ever and again that every human being has this feeling, as a human being. It is my kind of injustice."

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"A solitary suffers terribly from any suspicion concerning the few people he loves."

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"I wish you would raise yourself up before me, not that you make yourself still smaller. How am I to forgive you if I do not first rediscover in you the character for whose sake one can forgive you!"

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Without knowledge of history, the way things are now seems inevitable."

Walter J. Ong, Orality & Literacy

"A chronic lack of pleasure, of any enjoyable, rewarding or stimulating experiences, produces a slow, gradual, day-by-day erosion of man's emotional vitality, which he may ignore or repress, but which is recorded by the relentless computer of his subconscious mechanism that registers an ebbing flow, then a trickle, then a few last drops of fuel--until the day when his inner motor stops and he wonders desperately why he has no desire to go on, unable to find any definable cause of his hopeless, chronic sense of exhaustion."

Ayn Rand, The Voice of Reason, p104

"The genius who fights 'every form of tyranny over the mind of man' is fighting a battle for which the lesser men do not have the strength, but on which their freedom, their dignity, and their integrity depend."

Ayn Rand

"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of beeing free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."

John Stuart Mill

"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

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

Martin Luther King

"None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Burning the US flag might be wrong, but only because it's the one country in the world where you are guaranteed the right to do it."

Slashdot user NoMoreNicksLeft

"Ehrlich would start out by saying, 'Well, it's really very simple, Johnny.' Now the one thing I knew in those days about population was that nothing about it is simple. But what could I do? Go talk to five people? Here was a guy reaching a vast audience, leading this juggernaut of environmentalist hysteria, and I felt utterly helpless."

Julian Simon

"The author of this paper seems to suffer from the common practice of those in a hurry to finish their term papers that if they somehow ignore the elephant in the room that disproves their point they might end up getting partial credit for impressing people with how well they can tap dance around the elephant."

Slashdot user Jim McCoy

"He that fears you present will hate you absent."

Anonymous

"An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile--hoping it will eat him last."

Winston Churchill, 1954

"When brute force is on the march, compromise is the red carpet."

Ayn Rand

"Deference is the most indirect and the most elegant of all compliments."

William Sherstone, Of Men and Manners

"The harder you work, the harder it is to surrender."

Vince Lombardi

"One does not strive for joy... joy accompanies; joy does not move."

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"The death of endeavor is the birth of disgust."

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1906

"Those were steps for me, and I have climbed up over them: to that end I had to pass over them. Yet they thought that I wanted to retire on them."

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Mr. Atlee is a very modest man. But then he has much to be modest about."

Winston Churchill

"One never dives into the water to save a drowning man more eagerly than when there are others present who dare not take the risk."

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"The one who loves the least, controls the relationship."

Robert Anthony

"If you don't control your mind, someone else will."

John Allston

"Everybody's a self-made man; but only the successful ones are ever willing to admit it."

Unknown

"When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators."

P. J. O'Rourke

"Before you can do things for people, you must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the secondary consequences. The work, not the people."

Ayn Rand as Howard Roark, The Fountainhead

"An attempt to gain a value by deceiving the mind of others is an act of raising your victims to a position higher than reality, where you become a pawn of their blindness, a slave of their non-thinking and their evasions, while their intelligence, their rationality, their perceptiveness become the enemies you have to dread and flee."

Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

"Of any achievements open to you, the one that makes all others possible is the creation of your own character."

Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

"By inserting itself in issues like retirement, health care, social programs, farm programs, welfare, public housing, education -- small wonder that the federal government shirks its primary responsibility -- self-defense."

Larry Elder, Government--not Bush--Failed on 9-11

Ayn Rand as Francisco D'Anconia, Atlas Shrugged

"A difference that makes no difference is no difference."

Bertrand Russell or Ralph Waldo Emerson (anyone know?)

"A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money."

G. Gordon Liddy

"Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others, and no interference with their persons or property."

Lysander Spooner

"Life is a perpetual instruction in cause and effect."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently."

Henry Ford

"I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy."

Richard Feynman

"Observe that in World War II, Germany and Russia dismantled entire factories in conquered countries, to ship them home--while the freest one of the 'mixed economies,' the semi-capitalistic United States, sent billions worth of lend-lease equipment, including entire factories, to its allies. Germany and Russia needed war; the United States did not and gained nothing. Yet it is capitalism that today's peace-lovers oppose and statism that they advocate--in the name of peace."

Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

"The enormous majority of citizens are honest without any regard whatever to the threats of the law. The real punishment of normal man is the loss of the consciousness of that individual power and greatness which are the sources of his inner life."

Maria Montessori. The Montessori Method. Schocken Books. 1964. 26

"A real patriot is the fellow who gets a parking ticket and rejoices that the system works."

Bill Vaughan

"One cannot proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means."

Daniel Amyot

"At the source of every error which is blamed on the computer you will find at least two human errors, including the error of blaming it on the computer."

Gilb's Laws of Unreliability

"The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exaulted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy... neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water."

Dr. John W. Gardner

"I don't have a solution but I certainly admire the problem."

Ashleigh Brilliant

"The comparative advantage of poorer countries is precisely that their wages are low, thus reducing the costs of production. If multinational corporations had to pay the same wages as in their home countries, they would not bother to invest in poorer countries at all."

Edwin A. Locke, Anti-Globalization: The Left's Violent Assault on Global Prosperity

"We knew the world could not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita: 'I am became Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another."

J Robert Oppenheimer, (1904-1967) American physicist, Recalling the explosion of the first atomic bomb near Almogordo, New Mexico [Jul. 15, 1945]

"In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite."

Dirac

"Appetite, n. An instinct thoughtfully implanted by Providence as a solution to the labor question."

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

"A man is not paid for having a head and hands, but for using them."

Elbert Hubbard

"Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy."

Howard W. Newton

"Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it."

Dwight D. Eisenhower

"Good leaders being scarce, following yourself is allowed."

Unknown

"Admiration: Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves."

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

"Oh how sweet it is to hear one's own convictions from another's lips."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"[John Nash's] fear of being drafted remained acute long after the Korean War ended and after he turned twenty-six (the age cut-off for draft eligibility). It eventually reached delusional proportions and helped drive him to attempt to abandon his American citizenship and seek political asylum abroad.

"Interestingly, Nash's gut instinct has since been validated by schizophrenia researchers. None of the life events known to produce mental disorders such as depression or anxiety neurosis--combat, death of a loved one, divorce, loss of job--have ever been convincingly implicated in the onset of schizophrenia. But several studies have since shown that basic military training during peacetime can precipitate schizophrenia in men with a hitherto unsuspected vulnerability to the illness. Although the study subjects were all carefully screened for mental illness, hospitalization rates for schizophrenia turned out to be abnormally high, especially for draftees."

Sylvia Nasar, A Beautiful Mind, pp125-126

"Of all the statist violations of individual rights in a mixed economy, the military draft is the worst. It is an abrogation of rights. It negates man's fundamental right--the right to life--and establishes the fundamental principle of statism: that a man's life belongs to the state, and the state may claim it by compelling him to sacrifice it in battle. If the state may force a man to risk death or hideous maiming and crippling, in a war declared at the state's discretion, for a cause he may neither approve of nor even understand, if his consent is not required to send him into unspeakable martyrdom--then, in principle, all rights are negated in that state, and its government is not man's protector any longer. What is there left to protect?"

Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

"The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he is on."

Joseph Heller, Catch 22

"To die for an idea is to place a pretty high price on conjectures."

Anatole France, from The Revolt of the Angel

"Never do today what you can put off till tomorrow. Delay may give clearer light as to what is best to be done."

Aaron Burr

"A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step."

Lao Tzu

"Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong."

Winston Churchill

"The mountain remains unmoved at seeming defeat by the mist."

Rabindranath Tagore

"The noble soul has reverence for itself."

Friedrich Nietzsche

"The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold."

Aristotle

"The grand aim of all science is to cover the greatest number of empirical facts by logical deduction from the smallest number of hypotheses or axioms."

Albert Einstein, Life Magazine, 1/9/50

"The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without."

Dwight D. Eisenhower

"Every man who observes vigilantly and resolves steadfastly grows unconsciously into genius."

Edward George Earle Lytton

"To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men-that is genius."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Beware of dissipating your powers; strive constantly to concentrate them. Genius thinks it can do whatever it sees others doing, but is sure to repent of every ill-judged outlay."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"The essence of genius is to know what to overlook."

William James

"Reason can answer questions, but imagination has to ask them."

Ralph Gerard

"It is a farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues do not result from the exercise of its own reason."

Mary Wollstonecraft

"It is absurd to hold that a man ought to be ashamed of being unable to defend himself with his limbs, but not of being unable to defend himself with speech and reason, when the use of rational speech is more distinctive of a human being than the use of his limbs."

Aristotle

"What is good-heartedness, refinement, and genius to me, when the human being who has these virtues tolerates slack feelings in his faith and judgments, and when the demand for certainty is not to him the inmost craving and the deepest need."

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgement. Insensibly, one begins to twist facts to suit theories instead of theories to suit facts."

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet

"Any clod can have the facts, but having opinions is an art."

Charles McCabe

"Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is not more a science than a heap of stones is a home."

Henri Poincaré

"Presenting anecdotal evidence as proof is saying, 'I played Russian roulette and lived, so it must be safe.'"

Unknown

"The temperature of Heaven can be rather accurately computed. Our authority is Isaiah 30:26, "Moreover, the light of the Moon shall be as the light of the Sun and the light of the Sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days." Thus Heaven receives from the Moon as much radiation as we do from the Sun, and in addition 7*7 (49) times as much as the Earth does from the Sun, or 50 times in all. The light we receive from the Moon is one 1/10,000 of the light we receive from the Sun, so we can ignore that.... The radiation falling on Heaven will heat it to the point where the heat lost by radiation is just equal to the heat received by radiation, i.e., Heaven loses 50 times as much heat as the Earth by radiation. Using the Stefan-Boltzmann law for radiation, (H/E) temperature of the earth (-300K), gives H as 798K (525C). The exact temperature of Hell cannot be computed.... [However] Revelations 21:8 says "But the fearful, and unbelieving...shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone." A lake of molten brimstone means that its temperature must be at or below the boiling point, 444.6C. We have, then, that Heaven, at 525C is hotter than Hell at 445C."

From Applied Optics, vol. 11, A14, 1972

"I still say a church steeple with a lightning rod on top shows a lack of confidence."

Doug McLeod

"It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry."

H.L. Mencken

"The foundation of morality should not be made dependent on myth nor tied to any authority lest doubt about the myth or about the legitimacy of the authority imperil the foundation of sound judgment and action."

Albert Einstein

"The argument that groups have to be represented according to their percentage in the population implies, whether or not people realize it, that groups with above-average qualifications and performances must be denied the places that they qualify for."

Thomas Sowell, Race Rationales vs. Results, April 23, 2002

"What will you do if all your problems aren't solved by the time you die?"

Unknown

"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our necessities but of their advantages."

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

"Accident, n. An inevitable occurrence due to the action of immutable natural laws."

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

"Modernism is art about art. Whereas all of the great art in history is Art about life."

Fred Ross, The Great 20th Century Art Scam

"No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it facinating."

Harold Rosenberg

"Every absurdity has a champion to defend it."

Oliver Goldsmith

"The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow."

Ayn Rand. Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

"The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next."

fortune cookie

"The history of mankind is the history of ideas. For it is ideas, theories and doctrines that guide human action, determine the ultimate ends men aim at, and the choice of the means employed for the attainment of these ends. The sensational events which stir the emotions and catch the interest of superficial observers are merely the consummation of ideological changes. There are no such things as abrupt sweeping transformations of human affairs. What is called, in rather misleading terms, a 'turning point in history' is the coming on the scene of forces which were already for a long time at work behind the scene. New ideologies, which had already long since superseded the old ones, throw off their last veil and even the dullest people become aware of the changes which they did not notice before."

Ludwig von Mises, Socialism, p518

"History does not move by leaps into unrelated novelty, but rather by the selective emphasis of aspects of its own immediate past."

Julian Jaynes. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Mariner Books. 2000. p228

"The battle for the world is the battle for definitions."

Thomaz Szasz

"Conceptions of nature and of how to deal with any problem may fall either because they run counter to the facts of empirical observation or because they run counter to other conceptions which are somehow better anchored in the beliefs of men at a given time, or because of some combination of the two."

J. McV. Hunt. The Montessori Method. Schocken Books. 1964. xiii

"Truth never damages a cause that is just."

Mohandas K. Gandhi

"The worst thing that can happen to a good cause is not to be skillfully attacked, but to be ineptly defended."

Frederick Bastiat

"There's nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view that I hold dear."

Daniel Dennett

"Compromise is always only a momentary lull in the fight between the two principles, not the result of logical thinking-out of the problem."

Ludwig von Mises, Socialism, p245

"It is futile to fight against, if one does not know what one is fighting for."

Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

"No social system can stand for long without a moral base. Project a magnifiscent skyscraper being built on quicksands: while men are struggling upward to add the hundredth and two-hundredth stories, the tenth and twentieth are vanishing, sucked under by the muck. That it the history of capitalism, of its swaying, tottering attempt to stand erect on the foundation of the altruist morality."

Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

"What is wanted is not the will-to-believe, but the wish to find out, which is its exact opposite."

Bertrand Russell

"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance--it is the illusion of knowledge"

D. Boorstin

"The belief in truth begins with the doubt of all truths in which one has previously believed."

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Doubt is the beginning, not the end, of wisdom."

George Iles: Jottings

"Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when you have only one idea."

"Alain" (Emile Chartier)

"The only force I fear more than human irrationality is irrationality armed with passion."

Leo Rosten

"Men never do evil so fully and so happily as when they do it for conscience's sake."

Pascal

"Force is all-conquering, but its victories are short-lived."

Abraham Lincoln

"Any violence which does not spring from a spiritual base, will be wavering and uncertain. It lacks the stability which can only rest in a fanatical outlook."

Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf

"Beware of altruism. It is based on self-deception, the root of all evil."

Lazarus Long

"It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation; that the position of the individual ego is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole..., that above all the unity of a nation's spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual... This state of mind, which subordinates the interests of the ego to the conservation of the community, is really the first premise for every truly human culture... The basic attitude from which such activity arises, we call--to distinguish it from egoism and selfishness--idealism. By this we understand only the individual's capacity to make sacrifices for the community, for his fellow men."

Adolf Hitler, explaining the moral philosophy of Nazism

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

Voltaire

"The proof of an achieved self-esteem is your soul's shudder of contempt and rebellion against the role of a sacrificial animal, against the vile impertinence of any creed that proposes to immolate the irreplaceable value which is your consciousness and the incomparable glory which is your existence."

Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

"It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there is service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be master."

Ayn Rand as Ellsworth Toohey, The Fountainhead

"We often believe ourselves to be independent simply because no one commands us, and because we command others; but the nobleman who needs to call a servant to his aid is really a dependent through his own inferiority. The paralytic who cannot take off his boots because of a pathological fact, and the prince who dare not take them off because of a social fact, are in reality reduced to the same condition. In reality, he who is served is limited in his independence. This concept will be the foundation of the dignity of the man of the future; 'I do not wish to be served, because I am not impotent.' And this idea must be gained before men can feel themselves to be really free."

Maria Montessori. The Montessori Method. Schocken Books. 1964. 96-97

"I swear by my life and my love for it that I will never live for the sake of another man or ask another man to live for mine."

Ayn Rand as John Galt in Atlas Shrugged

"It is not a sacrifice to give your life for others, if death is your personal desire. To achieve the virtue of sacrifice, you must want to live, you must love it, you must burn with passion for this earth and for all the splendor it can give you--you must feel the twist of every knife as it slashes your desires away from your reach and drains your love out of your body."

Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

"I am thought.
I can see what the eyes cannot see.
I can hear what the ears cannot hear.
I can feel what the heart cannot feel.
Yet I create Beauty for the eyes,
    Music for the ears,
    Love for the heart.
They, ignorant of their ignorance, call me cold.
  Barren of Sight.
  Barren of Sound.
  Barren of Feeling.
But it is I who am from which all comes.
  Given to the ungrateful.
   Unseen.
   Unheard.
   Unfelt."

Peter Zarlenga

"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

"Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear."

Thomas Jefferson

"If faith cannot be reconciled with rational thinking, it has to be eliminated as an anachronistic remnant of earlier stages of culture and replaced by science dealing with facts and theories which are intelligible and can be validated."

Erich Fromm, Man for Himself

"Some methodological atheists formulate the principle by saying that the burden of proof is always on any person making an existence claim, since, from a logical point of view, existence claims are only capable of proof, not disproof. No one has ever proven the nonexistence of Santa Claus, or elves, or unicorns, or anything else, simply because the very logic of an unrestricted existential proposition prohibits its disproof. It is impossible to go all over the universe and show that, for example, there are no elves anywhere. For this reason, rational methodology calls for us to deny the existence of all those things which have never been shown to exist. That is why we all regard it rational to deny the existence of Santa Claus, elves, unicorns, etc. And since God is in that same category, having never been shown to exist, it follows that rational methodology calls for us to deny the existence of God."

Theodore M. Drange

"Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and other worlds."

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Heathen, n. A benighten creature who has the folly to worship something that he can see and feel."

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

"What, sir? You would make a ship sail against the wind and currents by lighting a bonfire under her decks? I pray you excuse me. I have no time to listen to such nonsense."

Napoleon Bonaparte to Robert Fulton, after hearing Fulton's plans for a steam engine driven boat.

"A sure sign of a genius is that all of the dunces are in a confederacy against him."

Frank Lloyd Wright

"Spiritual movements are revolts of thought against inertia, of the few against the many; of those who because they are strong in spirit are strongest alone against those who can express themselves only in the mass and the mob, and who are significant only because they are numerous."

Ludwig von Mises. Socialism. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. 1981. p53

"Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence."

Albert Einstein

"In questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual."

Galileo Galilei

"The person who loves everybody and feels at home everywhere is the true hater of mankind. He expects nothing of men, so no form of depravity can outrage him. [...] One can't love man without hating most of the creatures who pretend to bear his name."

Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

"Whoever knows he is deep, strives for clarity; whoever would like to appear deep to the crowd, strives for obscurity. For the crowd considers anything deep if only it cannot see to the bottom: the crowd is so timid and afraid of going into the water."

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Nothing sways the stupid more than arguments they can't understand."

Cardinal de Retz

"People who think honestly and deeply have a hostile attitude towards the public."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"To suppose that the eye [...] could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory."

Charles Darwin

"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."

Albert Einstein, 1954, from Albert Einstein: The Human Side, edited by H. Dukas and B. Hoffman, Princeton University Press

"...this monkey mythology of Darwin is the cause of permissiveness, promiscuity, prophylactics, perversions, pregnancies, abortions, pornotherapy, pollution, poisoning and proliferation of crimes of all types."

Judge Braswell Dean, Time Magazine, March 1981

"Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night."

Isaac Asimov

"In the beginning, there was nothing. Then God said 'Let there be light,' and there was still nothing, but you could see it."

Dave Thomas

"To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin."

Cardinal Belleramine

"In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point."

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"7 deadly sins in one sentence: It enrages me that I, a clearly superior person, should have less money than my neighbor, whose wife I would love to fuck if I weren't so busy eating pork chops and sleeping all day."

Steve Archer

"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel."

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

"There are for man only two principles available for a mental grasp of reality, namely, those of teleology and causality. What cannot be brought under either of these categories is absolutely hidden to the human mind. An event not open to an interpretation by one of these two principles is for man inconceivable and mysterious. Change can be conceived as the outcome either of the operation of mechanistic causality or of purposeful behavior; for the human mind there is no third way available."

Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

"The best thoughts are the most delicate,
fastest, trickiest to capture.
Lepidoptera so different on the wing,
than when caught, killed,
and proudly displayed."

Randy Read, 1981

"False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils except destruction. The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. Can it be supposed that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, the most important of the code, will respect the less important and arbitrary ones, which can be violated with ease and impunity, and which, if strictly obeyed, would put an end to personal liberty... and subject innocent persons to all the vexations that the guilty alone ought to suffer? Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man. They ought to be designated as laws not preventive but fearful of crimes, produced by the tumultuous impression of a few isolated facts, and not by thoughtful consideration of the inconveniences and advantages of a universal decree."

Criminologist Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishment

"People who object to weapons aren't abolishing violence, they're begging for rule by brute force, when the biggest, strongest animals among men were always automatically 'right.' Guns ended that, and social democracy is a hollow farce without an armed populace to make it work."

L. Neil Smith, The Probability Broach

"When men feel strongly about an issue, yet refuse to name it, when they fight savagely for some seemingly incoherent, unintelligible goal--one may be sure that their actual goal would not stand public identification."

Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

"It is better to be wrong, than to be vague."

Freeman J. Dyson

"If it is proved that the theory concerned is untenable, the notion of rationalization is a psychological interpretation of the causes which made their authors liable to error. But if we are not in a position to find any fault in the theory advanced, no appeal to the concept of rationalization can possibly explode its validity."

Ludwig von Mises, Human Action