"The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold."
Aristotle (384BC-322BC)

"That which can be destroyed by the truth should be."
P. C. Hodgell (b.1951)

"He who has the truth for friend
Has one true friend to the end."
Brian Faulkner (b.1946)

"Subtlety may deceive you; integrity never will."
Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658)

"Of any achievements open to you, the one that makes all others possible is the creation of your own character."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Atlas Shrugged

"Habit is a cable; we weave a thread of it each day, and at last we cannot break it."
Horace Mann (1796-1859)

"Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems."
Rene Descartes (1596-1650), Discourse on Method

"Every man who observes vigilantly and resolves steadfastly grows unconsciously into genius."
Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873)

"Whoever thinks much and to good purpose easily forgets his own experiences, but not the thoughts which these experiences have called forth."
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

"You seek problems because you need their gifts."
Richard Bach (b.1936)

"The investigation of the meaning of words is the beginning of education."
Antisthenes (c.445BCE–c.365BCE)

"The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names."
Chinese proverb

"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

"Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982)

"No mind is better than the precision of its concepts."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

"It is better to be wrong, than to be vague."
Freeman J. Dyson (b.1923)

"Since in this world liars may win belief,
Be sure of the opposite likewise--that this world
Hears many a true word and believes it not."
Euripides (~480BC–406BC) in `Thyestes` according to Aristotle in `Rhetoric`

"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 Nietzsche (1844-1900)

"Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious."
George Orwell (1903-1950)

"The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982)

"The first thing that intellect does with an object is to class it with something else."
William James (1842–1910)

"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 (1879-1955), Life Magazine, 1/9/50

"Integration is the essential part of understanding."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982)

"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 (1905-1982), Atlas Shrugged

"Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Atlas Shrugged

"Identity is unaffected by identification."
Vladimir Kornea (b.1979)

"The mountain remains unmoved at seeming defeat by the mist."
Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941)

"The truth is always more interesting than your preconception of what it might be."
Steven Levy

"Reality exists as an objective absolute."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982)

"Reality is an omnipresent context."
Vladimir Kornea (b.1979)

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

"Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed."
Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

"Life is a perpetual instruction in cause and effect."
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

"The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one."
Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915)

"Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently."
Henry Ford (1863-1947)

"A man flattened by an opponent can get up again. A man flattened by conformity stays down for good."
Thomas John Watson, Sr (1874-1956)

"Failure is not the falling down, but the staying down."
Mary Pickford (1893-1979)

"Most of my advances were by mistake. You uncover what is when you get rid of what isn't."
Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983)

"To fail is a natural consequence of trying. To succeed takes time and prolonged effort in the face of unfriendly odds. To think it will be any other way, no matter what you do, is to invite yourself to be hurt and to limit your enthusiasm for trying again."
David Viscott (1938-1996)

"You haven't failed until you give up."
Anonymous

"One is always a long way from solving a problem until one actually has the answer."
Stephen Hawking (b.1942)

"No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true."
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864), The Scarlet Letter, 1850

"You may deceive all the people part of the time, and part of the people all the time, but not all the people all the time."
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

"No man has a good enough memory to make a successful liar."
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

"The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere."
Anne Morrow Lindbergh

"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 (1905-1982), Atlas Shrugged

"Self-esteem is reliance on one's power to think. It cannot be replaced by one's power to deceive. The self-confidence of a scientist and the self-confidence of a con man are not interchangeable states, and do not come from the same psychological universe. The success of a man who deals with reality augments his self-confidence. The success of a con man augments his panic."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982)

"Rather fail with honor than succeed by fraud."
Sophocles (5th Century BC)

"A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval."
Mark Twain (1835–1910)

"Conscience warns us as a friend before it punishes as a judge."
Stanislaus Leszczynski (1677-1766)

"He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world's believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions."
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), 1785 leter to Peter Carr

"Guilt is the price of the unearned."
Vladimir Kornea (b.1979)

"I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live by the light that I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right, and stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong."
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

"I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can do."
Edward Everett Hale (1822-1909)

"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 Nietzsche (1844-1900)

"One must never ask whether the truth will be useful or whether it may become one's fatality."
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

"Truth never damages a cause that is just."
Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948)

"Fear not the path of truth for the lack of people walking on it."
Arabic Proverb

"Definition of tragedy: A hero destroyed by the excess of his virtues"
Aristotle (384BC-322BC)

"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 Nietzsche (1844-1900)

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

"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 Nietzsche (1844-1900)

"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 Nietzsche (1844-1900)

"I can accept anything, except what seems to be the easiest for most people: the half-way, the almost, the just-about, the in-betweeen."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982)

"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 Nietzsche (1844-1900)

"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 (1905-1982), Atlas Shrugged

"The noble soul has reverence for itself."
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

"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 (1905-1982) as John Galt in Atlas Shrugged

"I do not recognize anyone's right to one minute of my life, nor to any part of my energy, nor to any achievement of mine, no matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982), The Fountainhead

"If I were asked to serve the interests of society apart from, above and against my own--I would refuse. I would reject it as the most contemptible evil, I would fight it with every power I possess, I would fight the whole of mankind, if one minute were all I could last before I were murdered, I would fight in the full confidence of the justice of my battle."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982) as Hank Rearden, Atlas Shrugged

"If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains set lightly upon you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."
Samuel Adams (1722-1803)

"Freedom is a heavy load. A great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy, it is not a gift given, but a choice made."
Victor Hugo (1802-1885)

"The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking."
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006)

"The relaxed mind cannot lead a severe life."
Victor Hugo (1802-1885), Les Miserables

"Men are good in one way, but bad in many."
Aristotle (384BC-322BC), Nicomachean Ethics

"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 (1879-1955)

"A sure sign of a genius is that all of the dunces are in a confederacy against him."
Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959)

"If you are ruled by mind you are a king; if by body, a slave."
Cato the Elder

"Reason obeys itself; and ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it."
Thomas Paine

"An investment in knowledge pays the best interest."
Benjamin Franklin

"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 Nietzsche (1844-1900)

"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 best man is he who most tries to perfect himself, and the happiest man is he who most feels that he is perfecting himself."
Socrates

"It is by doing just acts that the just man is produced, and by doing temperate acts the temperate man; without doing these no one would have even a prospect of becoming good. But most people do not do these, but take refuge in theory and think they are being philosophers and will become good in this way, behaving somewhat like patients who listen attentively to their doctors, but do none of the things they are ordered to do. As the latter will not be made well in body by such a course of treatment, the former will not be made well in soul by such a course of philosophy."
Aristotle (384BC-322BC), Nicomachean Ethics

"He who stops being better stops being good."
Oliver Cromwell

"Your real security is yourself. You know you can do it, and they can't ever take that away from you."
Mae West (1893-1980)

"If one is to love oneself one must behave in ways that one can admire."
Irvin Yalom

"My self-esteem is more valuable than any short-term rewards for its betrayal."
Nathaniel Branden, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem

"Hell--and heaven--and purgatory--are living with yourself."
Vladimir Kornea (b.1979)

"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

"Character is the accumulated confidence that individual men and women acquire from years of doing the right thing, over and over again, even when they don't feel like it. People with character understand that their lives are filled with events and choices that are significant, above all, not because of the short term success or failure of the search for money or position, but because the choices we make are actually making us into one kind of person, or another."
Alan Keyes (b.1950)

"Conscious decisions program subconscious habits. Do by willpower so that you may do by habit."
Vladimir Kornea (b.1979)

"No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character."
Ralph Waldo Emmerson

"It's no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."
Krishnamarti

"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. For the wicked man, what he does clashes with what he ought to do, but what the good man ought to do he does; for reason in each of its possessors chooses what is best for itself, and the good man obeys his reason."
Aristotle (384BC-322BC)

"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 (1881-1973). Socialism. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. 1981. p53

"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 Nietzsche (1844-1900)

"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 Nietzsche (1844-1900)

"If the average man is made in God's image, then a man such as Beethoven or Aristotle is plainly superior to God, and so God may be jealous of him, and eager to see his superiority perish with his bodily frame. All animal breeders know how difficult it is to maintain a fine strain. The universe seems to be in a conspiracy to encourage the endless reproduction of peasants and Socialists, but a subtle and mysterious opposition stands eternally against the reproduction of philosophers."
H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)

"While all men may be created equal, it is obvious that they do not remain that way."
David Dyer

"The price we pay when pursuing any art or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side."
James Arthur Baldwin

"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 (1905-1982), The Fountainhead

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

"The road to success is dotted with many tempting parking places."
Unknown

"The death of endeavor is the birth of disgust."
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1906

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

"Creative work is an affirmation of life."
Vladimir Kornea (b.1979)

"The heights by great men reached and kept, were not obtained by sudden flight. But they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night."
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"I've never really viewed myself as particularly talented. I've viewed myself as slightly above average in talent. And where I excel is ridiculous, sickening, work ethic. You know, while the other guy's sleeping? I'm working. While the other guy's eatin’? I'm working."
Will Smith

"When you are not practicing, remember, someone somewhere is practicing, and when you meet him he will win."
Ed Macauley

"It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer."
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

"Look at a day when you are supremely satisfied at the end. It's not a day when you lounge around doing nothing; it's when you've had everything to do, and you've done it."
Margaret Thatcher (b.1925)

"Relaxation is attractive only in those for whom it is an unnatural state."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982), The Fountainhead

"Life is to be lived. If you have to support yourself, you had bloody well better find some way that is going to be interesting. And you don't do that by sitting around wondering about yourself."
Katherine Hepburn

"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 (1905-1982) as Howard Roark, The Fountainhead

"Only he is successful in his business who makes that pursuit which affords him the highest pleasure sustain him."
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

"The man who does not work for the love of work but only for money is not likely to make money nor find much fun in life."
Charles M. Schwab (1862-1939)

"Invent your own job; take such an interest in it that you eat, sleep, dream, walk, talk, and live nothing but your work until you succeed."
Walt Disney (1901-1966)

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

"...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

"We owe science to the combined energies of individual men of genius, rather than to any tendency to progress inherent in civilization."
Chauncey Wright

"The truth is not for all men, but only for those who seek it."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982)

"If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
Sir Isaac Newton

"All sentient beings are created unequal. The best society provides each with equal opportunity to float at his own level."
Frank Herbert (1920-1986), The Dosadi Experiment

"Nature does not grant anyone an innate title of 'consumer'; it is a title that has to be earned—-by production."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982)

"A man must stand straight, and not be kept straight by others."
Marcus Aurelius

"The steps of a man sound heavier when he is alone in the hall."
Louis L'Amour as Mathurin Kerbouchard in The Walking Drum

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

"The weak are the most treacherous of us all. They come to the strong and drain them. They are bottomless. They are insatiable. They are always parched and always bitter. They are everyone's concern and like vampires they suck our life's blood."
Bette Davis (1908-1989)

"Cunning and treachery are the offspring of incapacity."
François de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)

"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."
Isaac Asimov, Foundation

"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 (1905-1982)

"Property is the fruit of labor; property is desirable; it is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become rich and, hence, is just encouragement to industry and enterprise."
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

"That some achieve great success, is proof to all that others can achieve it as well."
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

"Show me your achievement--and the knowledge will give me courage for mine."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982)

"Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance."
Samuel Johnson

"Mountains cannot be surmounted except by winding paths."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

"There is nothing so easy but that it becomes difficult when you do it reluctantly."
Publius Terentius Afer (Terence)

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

"A year from now you may wish you had started today."
Karen Lamb

"He has half the deed done who has made a beginning."
Horace (65-8 BC)

"There are many laters but only one now."
Bill Brent

"What can be done at any time is never done at all."
English Proverb

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

"Death is not a deadline."
Vladimir Kornea (b.1979)

"Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present."
Albert Camus

"One thing at a time. Most important thing first. Start now."
Unknown

"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

"Friends are lost by calling often and calling seldom."
Scottish proverb

"To be idle and to be poor have always been reproaches, and therefore every man endeavors with his utmost care to hide his poverty from others, and his idleness from himself."
Dr Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

"Most of our faults are more pardonable than the means we use to conceal them."
François de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680), "Maxims" (1665)

"It is not our disadvantages or shortcomings that are ridiculous, but rather the studious way we try to hide them, and our desire to act as if they did not exist."
Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837)

"One of the greatest moments in anybody's developing experience is when he no longer tries to hide from himself but determines to get acquainted with himself as he really is."
Norman Vincent Peale (1898-1993)

"Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise."
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

"Self-criticism, in the sense of an introspective, discriminating activity, is indispensable in any attempt to understand your own psychology. If you have done something that puzzles you and you ask yourself what could have prompted you to such an action, you need the string of bad conscience and its discriminating faculty in order to discover the real motive of your behavior."
Carl Jung (1875-1961), "Dogma and Natural Symbols"

"To fear to face an issue is to believe that the worst is true."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Atlas Shrugged

"A corrected mistake ceases to exist; an evaded mistake lives forever."
Vladimir Kornea (b.1979)

"Thinking is a momentary dismissal of irrelevancies."
Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983)

"When you write down your ideas you automatically focus your full attention on them. Few if any of us can write one thought and think another at the same time. Thus a pencil and paper make excellent concentration tools."
Michael Leboeuf

"Don't worry that children never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you."
Robert Fulghum (b.1933)

"Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them."
James Arthur Baldwin (1924 – 1987)

"The greatest gift you can give a child is an example of genuine adult happiness."
John Paquette

"What we think or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only thing of consequence is what we do."
John Ruskin

"Men weary as much of not doing the things they want to do as of doing the things they do not want to do."
Eric Hoffer (1902-1983)

"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 (1905-1982), The Voice of Reason, p104

"They call you heartless: but you have a heart, and I love you for being ashamed to show it. You are ashamed of your flood, while others are ashamed of their ebb."
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

"Love, with very young people, is a heartless business. We drink at that age from thirst, or to get drunk; it is only later in life that we occupy ourselves with the individuality of our wine. A young man in love is essentially enraptured by the forces within himself."
Isak Dinesen aka Karen Blixen, 1885 - 1962

"Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is."
Rollo May

"A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space."
Gloria Steinem

"I prefer a man who will burn the flag and then wrap himself in the Constitution to a man who will burn the Constitution and then wrap himself in the flag."
Craig Washington

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

"A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away."
Barry Goldwater (1909-1998)

"We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating or complex--but Congress can."
Cullen Hightower

"To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves."
Claude-Adrien Helvetius (1715-1771)

"A pint of sweat saves a gallon of blood."
George S. Patton (1885-1945)

"Blind aggressiveness would destroy the attack itself, not the defense."
Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831)

"Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win."
Jonathan Kozol

"Gain may be temporary and uncertain; but ever while you live, expense is constant and certain."
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

"A good scare is worth more than good advice."
Horace (65-8 BC)

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944)

"You only have power over people so long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything he's no longer in your power--he's free again."
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"Architecture is a hypothesis about the future that holds that subsequent change will be confined to that part of the design space encompassed by that architecture."
Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder

"A period of exploration and experimentation is often beneficial before making enduring architectural commitments."
Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder

"Premature architecture can be more dangerous than none at all, as unproved architectural hypotheses turn into straightjackets that discourage evolution and experimentation."
Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder

"Love truth, but pardon error."
Voltaire (1694-1778)

"He who accuses all of mankind convicts only one."
Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

"I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am."
Joseph Baretti

"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

"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 (1749-1832)

"To give a reason for anything is to breed a doubt of it."
William Hazlitt

"Virtue debases itself in justifying itself."
Voltaire (1694-1778)

"People will take you at your own reckoning."
Isaac Asimov (1920-1992)

"Nine times out of ten, the first thing a man's companion knows of his shortcomings is from his apology."
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr (1809-1894)

"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 Nietzsche (1844-1900)

"We only acknowledge small faults in order to make it appear that we are free from great ones."
La Rouchefoucauld

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

"To find out a girl's faults, praise her to her girlfriends."
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

"Admiration: Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves."
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

"Persons who insist to themselves that under one set of conditions only can they lead interesting and satisfying lives lay themselves open to bitter disappointments and frustrations."
Hortense Odlum (1881-1970)

"If pleasures are greatest in anticipation, just remember that this is also true of trouble."
Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915)

"It's easier to act your way into a feeling than it is to feel your way into an action."
C. S. Lewis (1898-1963)

"Crash programs fail because they are based on the theory that, with nine women pregnant, you can get a baby in a month."
Wernher von Braun (1912-1977)

"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 (1905-1982)

"What people demand at an artificially low price exceeds what other people will supply at such prices."
Thomas Sowell (b.1930)

"If you have a right to respect, that means other people don't have a right to their own opinions."
Thomas Sowell (b.1930)

"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 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 (b.1930)

"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

"Cost is the value of the foregone option."
Unknown

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

"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 (1749-1832)

"Those are rare who fall without being degraded."
Victor Hugo (1802-1885), Les Miserables

"We do not want to be spared by our best enemies, nor by those we love thoroughly."
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

"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 Nietzsche (1844-1900)

"One repays a teacher badly if one always remains a pupil only."
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

"Without knowledge of history, the way things are now seems inevitable."
Walter J. Ong, Orality & Literacy

"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 (1905-1982)

"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

"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 (1905-1982)

"Find out just what the people will submit to and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."
Frederick Douglass, Aug. 4, 1857

"You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life."
Winston Churchill

"He who dares not offend cannot be honest."
Thomas Paine (1737-1809)

"He who trims himself to suit everyone will soon whittle himself away."
Raymond Hull

"To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men."
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
Martin Luther King

"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

"One does not strive for joy... joy accompanies; joy does not move."
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

"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 Nietzsche (1844-1900)

"Deference is the most indirect and the most elegant of all compliments."
William Sherstone, Of Men and Manners

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

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

"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

"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. The words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982) as Francisco D'Anconia, Atlas Shrugged

"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

"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 (1905-1982), Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

"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 exalted 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]

"The higher our self-esteem, the more open, honest, and appropriate our communications are likely to be, because we believe our thoughts have value and thefore we welcome rather than fear clarity."
Nathaniel Branden, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem

"Appetite, n. An instinct thoughtfully implanted by Providence as a solution to the labor question."
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

"For every new mouth to feed, there are two hands to produce."
Peter T. Bauer

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

"Immortality costs infinity dollars."
Paul Siraisi

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

"Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves."
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

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

"Leaders must be close enough to relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them."
John Maxwell

"[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 (1905-1982), 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

"The people of every country are the only safe guardians of their own rights, and are the only instruments which can be used for their destruction."
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) to John Wyche, 1809

"A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything."
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

"A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it."
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

"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 (1905-1982), Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

"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

"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 (1803-1882)

"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 (1749-1832)

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

"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 (384BC-322BC)

"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

"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

"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 (1879-1955)

"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 (1905-1982), Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

"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 (b.1930), Race Rationales vs. Results, April 23, 2002

"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

"Every absurdity has a champion to defend it."
Oliver Goldsmith

"The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next."
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

"The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982). Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

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

"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 (1881-1973), Socialism, p245

"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

"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

"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 (1881-1973), Socialism, p518

"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."
George Orwell, "1984"

"The victor will never be asked if he told the truth."
Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)

"Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas."
Joseph Stalin (1878-1953)

"Ideas are to our evolving mind what mutations are to our species."
Leroy Jack Syrop

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

"The battle for the world is the battle for definitions."
Thomas Szasz (misquoted)

"In the animal kingdom, the rule is eat or be eaten. In the human kingdom, define or be defined. Every disagreement in the world is a matter of definition and degree."
Kaylanis Law

"Oh how sweet it is to hear one's own convictions from another's lips."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

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

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

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

"None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

"Tradition is a guide and not a jailer."
W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)

"The belief in truth begins with the doubt of all truths in which one has previously believed."
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

"Doubt is the beginning, not the end, of wisdom."
George Iles: Jottings

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

"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."
Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), Mein Kampf

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

"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 (1889-1945), explaining the moral philosophy of Nazism

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
Voltaire (1694-1778)

"Don't bother to examine a folly; instead ask yourself what it accomplishes."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982)

"We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions."
Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), National Socialist German Workers' Party

"When individual rights are abrogated, there is no way to determine who is entitled to what; there is no way to determine the justice of anyone's claims, desires, or interests. The criterion, therefore, reverts to the tribal concept of: one's wishes are limited only by the power of one's gang. In order to survive under such a system, men have no choice but to fear, hate, and destroy one another; it is a system of underground plotting, of secret conspiracies, of deals, favors, betrayals, and sudden, bloody coups."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982)

"Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question."
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

"No man has ever ruled other men for their own good."
George D. Herron

"No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent."
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

"What luck for rulers that men do not think."
Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)

"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

"Force is all-conquering, but its victories are short-lived."
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

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

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

"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 (1905-1982) as Ellsworth Toohey, The Fountainhead

"What happens under slavery? From each according to his ability; to each according to his need."
Vladimir Kornea (b.1979)

"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 (1905-1982), Atlas Shrugged

"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule."
H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)

"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

"Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. 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 blindfolded fear."
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

"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

"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

"Atheism is the principled refusal to credit an idea that has no rational basis and makes no sense."
Harry Binswanger, HBL

"As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Musselmen; and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries."
Treaty of Tripoli, 1796

"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 (1879-1955), 1954, from Albert Einstein: The Human Side, edited by H. Dukas and B. Hoffman, Princeton University Press

"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

"In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point."
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel."
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

"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

"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 (1881-1973), Human Action

"Men who accept as an ideal an irrational goal which they cannot achieve, never lift their heads thereafter--and never discover that their bowed heads were the only goal to be achieved."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

"An intellect does not function on the premise of its own impotence."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

"If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual."
Frank Herbert (1920-1986), The Dosadi Experiment

"Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming, where everyone is interdependent."
John Dewey (1859-1952), 1899, Progressive educational philosopher, proponent of modern public schools.

"Independent self-reliant people would be a counterproductive anachronism in the collective society of the future where people will be defined by their associations."
1896 John Dewey, Progressive educational philosopher, proponent of modern public schools.

"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education."
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
Henry Ford

"Existentialism, in essence, consists of pointing to modern philosophy and declaring: 'Since *this* is reason, to hell with it!'"
Ayn Rand (1905-1982), The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

"Merely having an open mind is nothing; the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid."
G.K. Chesterton

"Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982) as Francisco D'Anconia in Atlas Shrugged

"God and Country are an unbeatable team; they break all records for oppression and bloodshed."
Luis Bunuel, 1900 - 1983

"The authority of any governing institution must stop at its citizens' skin."
Gloria Steinem

"Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best stage, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one."
Thomas Paine, 1737 - 1809

"One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors."
Plato

"I am interested in politics so that one day I will not have to be interested in politics."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982)

"Regulation - which is based on force and fear - undermines the moral base of business dealings. It becomes cheaper to bribe a building inspector than to meet his standards of construction. A fly-by-night securities operator can quickly meet all the S.E.C. requirements, gain the inference of respectability, and proceed to fleece the public. In an unregulated economy, the operator would have had to spend a number of years in reputable dealings before he could earn a position of trust sufficient to induce a number of investors to place funds with him. Protection of the consumer by regulation is thus illusory."
Alan Greenspan

"When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators."
P. J. O'Rourke

"If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy."
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

"Minimum wage rates, whether enforced by government decree or by labor union pressure and compulsion, are useless if they fix wage rates at the market level. But if they try to raise wage rates above the level which the unhampered labour market would have determined, they result in permanent unemployment of a great part of the potential labour force."
Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), Socialism, p486

"Minimum wage laws tragically generate unemployment, especially among the poorest and least skilled or educated workers... Because a minimum wage, of course, does not guarantee any worker's employment; it only prohibits, by force of law, anyone from being hired at the wage which would pay his employer to hire him."
Murray N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty

"See, when the Government spends money, it creates jobs; whereas when the money is left in the hands of Taxpayers, God only knows what they do with it. Bake it into pies, probably. Anything to avoid creating jobs."
Dave Barry

"A government with the policy to rob Peter to pay Paul can be assured of the support of Paul."
George Bernard Shaw

"A government with the policy to rob producers to pay parasites can be assured of the support of parasites."
Vladimir Kornea (b.1979) (with respect to George Bernard Shaw and Ayn Rand)

"When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation."
Adrian Rogers (1931-2005)

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the Public Treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the Public Treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy always followed by dictatorship."
Alexander Fraser Tyler, The Decline and Fall of the Athenian Republic

"The word 'politics' is derived from the word 'poly', meaning 'many', and the word 'ticks', meaning 'blood sucking parasites'."
Larry Hardiman

"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."
Winston Churchill

"Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule--and both commonly succeed, and are right."
H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)

"Democracy: tyranny of the motivated."
Vladimir Kornea (b.1979)

"Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state lives at the expense of everyone."
Frederick Bastiat

"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 (1905-1982), Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

"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 (1905-1982)

"The man who produces while others dispose of his product is a slave."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

"Majority rule only works if you're also considering individual rights. Because you can't have five wolves and one sheep voting on what to have for supper."
Larry Flynt

"You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer."
attributed to Abraham Lincoln by Ronald Reagan

"Motion pictures are of course a different medium of expression than the public speech, the radio, the stage, the novel, or the magazine. But the First Amendment draws no distinction between the various methods of communicating ideas."
William O. Douglas, Supreme Court Justice, 1953

"Let the people decide through the marketplace mechanism what they wish to see and hear. Why is there this national obsession to tamper with this box of transistors and tubes when we don't do the same for Time magazine?"
Mark Fowler, FCC Chairman

"Our liberty depends on freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost."
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

"We have rights, as individuals, to give as much of our own money as we please to charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of public money."
David Crockett, Congressman 1827-35

"Germans who wish to use firearms should join the SS or the SA - ordinary citizens don't need guns, as their having guns doesn't serve the State."
Heinrich Himmler

"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 (1743-1826)

"It is sobering to reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence."
Charles Austin Beard, historian

"The said constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms."
Samuel Adams (1722-1803)

"The conclusion is thus inescapable that the history, concept, and wording of the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, as well as its interpretation by every major commentator and court in the first half-century after its ratification, indicates that what is protected is an individual right of a private citizen to own and carry firearms in a peaceful manner."
Report of the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 97th Congress, Second Session (February 1982)

"The usual road to slavery is that first they take away your guns, then they take away your property, then last of all they tell you to shut up and say you are enjoying it."
James A. Donald

"In the transition to statism, every infringement of human rights has begun with the suppression of a given right's least attractive practitioners."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Philosophy: Who Needs It

"If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all."
Virginia Woolf, 1882 - 1941

"The cure for 1984 is 1776."
Seen on slashdot

"The U.S. Constitution may be flawed, but it's a whole lot better than what we have now."
Unknown

"The government was set to protect man from criminals--and the Constitution was written to protect man from the government. The Bill of Rights was not directed against private citizens, but against the government--as an explicit declaration that individual rights supersede any public or social power."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982), The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism

"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends"
Martin Luther King Jr.

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

"The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing."
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

"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 (1905-1982)

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."
H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)

"They came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. And then they came for me and by that time no one was left to speak up."
Daniel B. Baker, Political Quotations ed. Rev. Martin Niemoeller, a Protestant minister in Nazi Germany, in 1945

"He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."
Thomas Paine

"No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible."
Stanislaw Jerzy Lee

"In the field of morality, compromise is surrender to evil."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

"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 (1802-1885) about Jean Valjean, Les Miserables

"Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."
Barry Goldwater (1964)

"I would rather live in a society which treated children as adults than one which treated adults as children."
Lizard

"If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable."
Louis Dembitz Brandeis (1856-1941)

"What you cannot enforce, do not command."
Sophocles (5th Century BC)

"Useless laws weaken the necessary laws."
Montesquieu (1689-1755)

"When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law."
Frederic Bastiat

"I used often to go to America during Prohibition, and there was far more drunkenness there then than before."
Bertrand Russell, 1872 - 1970

"The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this."
Albert Einstein (1879-1955), My First Impression of the U.S.A., 1921

"Instead of giving money to found colleges to promote learning, why don't they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as good as the Prohibition one did, why, in five years we would have the smartest race of people on earth."
Will Rogers, 1879 - 1935

"Alcohol didn't cause the high crime rates of the '20s and '30s, Prohibition did. And drugs do not cause today's alarming crime rates, but drug prohibition does."
US District Judge James C. Paine, addressing the Federal Bar Association in Miami, November, 1991

"America needs fewer laws, not more prisons."
James Bovard

"Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed? ... We want them broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against... We're after power and we mean it. There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, 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. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted--and you create a nation of law-breakers--and then you cash in on guilt."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982) as Dr. Floyd Ferris, Atlas Shrugged, 406

"Every friend of freedom must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence."
Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize-winning economist

"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail."
Abraham Maslow

"It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place."
H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)

"Men are not against you; they are merely for themselves."
Gene Fowler

"Most people are far too much occupied with themselves to be malicious."
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

"Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity."
Nick Diamos

"He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser."
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

"There is luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel no one else has a right to blame us."
Oscar Wilde

"If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them."
Isaac Asimov

"The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them."
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

"The primitive thinker always sees things as having been organized from outside, never as having grown themselves, organically."
Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), Socialism, p262

"There is no psychology, only biography and autobiography."
Thomas Szasz

"Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it"
Richard Feynman

"America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own."
John Quincy Adams

"Tariffs, quotas and other import restrictions protect the business of the rich at the expense of high cost of living for the poor. Their intent is to deprive you of the right to choose, and to force you to buy the high-priced inferior products of politically favored companies."
Alan Burris, A Liberty Primer

"The only justification for our concepts and systems of concepts is that they serve to represent the complex of our experiences; beyond this they have no legitimacy."
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

"Schematization and classification per se have no cognitive value. The scientific significance of a concept arises out of its function in the theories to which it belongs; outside the context of these theories it is no more than intellectual plaything."
Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), Socialism, p293

"There's a difference between beauty and charm. A beautiful woman is one I notice. A charming woman is one who notices me."
John Erskine

"Personal beauty is a greater recommendation than any letter of reference."
Aristotle (384BC-322BC)

"Happiness is more effective than cosmetics."
Rae Foley, Ominous Star

"I don't mind hidden depths but I insist that there be a surface."
James Nicoll

"One shining quality lends a luster to another, or hides some glaring defect."
William Hazlitt

"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear."
Ambrose Redmoon

"I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies; for the hardest victory is over self."
Aristotle (384BC-322BC)

"I suppose every scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there; but no one else has ever read it, nor can he find it again."
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

"Some books are to be tasted, others swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested."
Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

"In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you."
Mortimer J. Adler

"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them."
Mark Twain (1835–1910)

"No steel can pierce the human heart as chillingly as a period at the right moment."
Isaac Babel

"Phrasing is like salt on scrambled eggs. It is plain if there is not enough, and if it can be noticed, there is too much."
Stevens Hewitt

"That is the sort of nonsense up with which I refuse to put."
Winston Churchill (attributed), after having been criticized for ending a sentence with a preposition.

"True eloquence consists in saying all that is necessary, and nothing but what is necessary."
François de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)

"The secret of being tiresome is to tell everything."
Voltaire (1694-1778)

"When a diplomat says yes, he means ‘perhaps'; When he says perhaps, he means ‘no'; When he says no, he is not a diplomat. When a lady says no, she means ‘perhaps'; When she says perhaps, she means ‘yes'; When she says yes, she is not a lady."
Voltaire (1694-1778) (Quoted, in Spanish, in Escandell 1993.)

"There are only two places in our world where time takes precedence over the job to be done: school and prison."
William Glasser

"Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion."
Oscar Wilde

"What is the nature of the guilt [called] Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state [considered] perfection? [The] myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge - he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil - he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor - he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire - he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which [he is damned] are reason, morality, creativeness, joy - all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that the myth of man's fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that [are held] as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Atlas Shrugged

"Absence lessens mediocre passions but augments great ones, just as the wind blows out candles but starts conflagrations."
François de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)

"Academism results when the reasons for the rule change, but not the rule."
Igor Stravinsky

"A difference that makes no difference is no difference."
Bertrand Russell or Ralph Waldo Emerson

"When I was a boy of fourteen my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learnt in seven years."
Mark Twain (1835–1910)

"Our senses don't deceive us: our judgment does."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

"Abstainer, n. A weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure."
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

"Frequently a big advantage can be gained by knowing how to give in at the right moment."
Fenelon

"Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment."
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

"There are hidden contradictions in the minds of people who 'love Nature' while deploring the 'artificialities' with which 'Man has spoiled "Nature".' The obvious contradiction lies in their choice of words, which imply that Man and his artifacts are not part of 'Nature'--but beavers and their dams are..."
Lazarus Long

"Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded--here and there, now and then--are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as 'bad luck'."
Lazarus Long

"In the field of observation, chance favors the prepared mind."
Louis Pasteur (1822-1895)

"The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators."
Edward Gibbon (1737-1794)

"Every organization is a perfect design to achieve the results it has achieved"
Unknown

"You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you."
Eric Hoffer (1902-1983)

"Pay attention to your enemies, for they are the first to discover your mistakes."
Antisthenes

"Silence is the best resolve for him who distrusts himself."
François de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)

"Moderation is made a virtue to limit the ambition of the great; to console ordinary people for their small fortune and equally small ability."
François de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)

"To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason is like administering medicine to the dead."
Thomas Paine

"Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scorn to smart Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams."
Mary Ellen Kelly

"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying."
Woody Allen (b. 1935)

"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

"Pride is the emotional reward of achievement. It is not a vice to be overcome but a virtue to be attained."
Nathaniel Branden, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem

"Virtue would not go far did not vanity escort her."
François de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680), Reflexions and Moral Maxims (1678)

"Attempts to escape nihilism without revaluating our values so far: they produce the opposite, make the problem more acute."
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

"Religion, n. A daughter of hope and fear explaining to ignorance the nature of the unknowable."
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

"A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud."
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

"Whoever wishes to keep a secret must hide the fact that he possesses one."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

"One does not write a love story while making love."
Collete (d. 1954), Lettre au petit Corsaire

"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."
Aldous Huxley

"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 (b.1930)

"We are each entitled to our own opinion, but no one is entitled to his own facts."
Patrick Moynihan

"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."
Stephen Roberts

"To wonder where the mind goes after the brain decays is as silly as asking where the 70-miles-per-hour have gone after a speeding auto has crashed into a tree."
Frank R. Zindler

"I have sworn eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

"When choosing between two evils I always like to take the one I've never tried before."
Mae West (1893-1980)

"Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the time. Vision with action can change the world."
Joel Barker

"Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet."
Victor Hugo

"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all."
Peter F. Drucker

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clarke

"The graveyards are full of indispensable men."
Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970)

"Miracles arise from our ignorance of nature, not from nature itself."
Montaigne

"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 (1879-1955)

"A fact never went into partnership with a miracle. Truth scorns the assistance of wonders. A fact will fit every other fact in the universe, and that is how you can tell whether it is or is not a fact. A lie will not fit anything except another lie."
Robert Ingersoll

"Finally I was forced to conclude that the alleged existence of god is but a myth, born of fear. That all gods including the Christian god are but figments of the imagination or outright inventions of the mind. I reasoned that the environment of primitive man which lacked a scientific explanation of nature's torments had every reason to be permeated with superstition but that we with our advanced scientific knowledge have no reason to appease imaginary gods. As I continued boring into my books the searchlight of knowledge was thrown upon my long cherished beliefs. I saw them for what they were worth. Reluctantly I shed them one by one. I did not label myself right away. I hardly knew what label to use. At first I called myself a Humanist. Sometimes an agnostic. Sometimes a Rationalist. Sometimes a Secularist. After many years of study and thought and assimilation I prefer a term that states my position clearly and positively. That is why I today declare myself an atheist. I evolved into an atheist not because I wanted to but because the evidence in all my books overwhelmingly pointed to a materialistic universe and against the plausible existence of supernatural beings or gods of any description."
G. Vincent Runyon, Why I Left The Ministry And Became An Atheist

"It is futile to fight against, if one does not know what one is fighting for."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

"I have always known that one day I would take this path though yesterday I did not know it would be today."
Ariwara no Narihari

"Adversity is the state in which a man most easily becomes acquainted with himself, being especially free from admirers then."
Samuel Johnson

"I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to those teachers."
Kahlil Gibran, Sand and Foam, 1926

"From listening comes wisdom, and from speaking repentance."
Italian proverb

"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

"It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf."
H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)

"Suppose Alfred justifiably believed the proposition 'p', and justifiably believed 'if p, then q'. He also believes 'q'. Is he justified in doing so? A Justified True Belief-er would quickly say yes - it's classic Modus Ponens. But what if Alfred didn't believe in 'q' for this deductive reason? What if he believed in 'q' because he liked the sound of it, or it was a comforting thought to him, unaware that it was also logically demanded by his other beliefs? This is not knowledge; it is merely a lucky accident."
Ranald Clouston

"When loyalty to an unyielding purpose is dropped by the virtuous, it's picked up by scoundrels--and you get the indecent spectacle of a cringing, bargaining, traitorous good and a self-righteously uncompromising evil."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982)

"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
William Pitt the Younger (1759-1806)

"What more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow citizens--a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government."
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826): 1st Inaugural, 1801. ME 3:320

"We are reduced to the alternative of choosing an unconditional submission to the tyranny of irritated ministers, or resistence by force. Honor, justice, and humanity forbid us tamely to surrender that freedom which we received from our gallant ancestors, and which our innocent posterity have a right to receive from us."
John Dickinson (1732-1808)

"It took centuries of intellectual, philosophical development to achieve political freedom. It was a long struggle, stretching from Aristotle to John Locke to the Founding Fathers. The system they established was not based on unlimited majority rule, but on its opposite: on individual rights, which were not to be alienated by majority vote or minority plotting."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982)

"Be sure you put your feet in the right place, then stand firm."
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

"Don't interfere with anything in the Constitution. That must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties."
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

"Don't worry when you are not recognized, but strive to be worthy of recognition."
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

"Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built."
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

"Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as a heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors."
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

"The assertion that 'all men are created equal' was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain and it was placed in the Declaration not for that, but for future use."
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

"The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty. Plainly, the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of liberty."
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

"The way for a young man to rise is to improve himself in every way he can, never suspecting that anybody wishes to hinder him."
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

"We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution."
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

"You cannot build character and courage by taking away a man's initiative and independence."
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

"You, that have toiled during youth, to set your son upon higher ground, and to enable him to begin where you left off, do not expect that son to be what you were--diligent, modest, active, simple in his tastes, fertile in resources... Poverty educated you; wealth will educate him. You cannot suppose the result will be the same."
Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743-1825)

"You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today."
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

"Either man's rights are inalienable, or they are not. You cannot say a thing such as "semi-inalienable" and consider yourself either honest or sane. When you begin making conditions, reservations and exceptions, you admit that there is something or someone above man's rights, who may violate them at his discretion. Who? Why, society--that is, the Collective. For what reason? For the good of the Collective. Who decides when rights should be violated? The Collective. If this is what you believe, move over to the side where you belong and admit that you are a Collectivist."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982)

"Just as the notion that "Anything I do is right because I chose to do it," is not a moral principle, but a negation of morality--so the notion that "Anything society does is right because society chose to do it," is not a moral principle, but a negation of moral principles and the banishment of morality from social issues."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982)

"Since there is no such entity as "the public," since the public is merely a number of individuals, any claimed or implied conflict of "the public interest" with private interests means that the interests of some men are to be sacrificed to the interests and wishes of others. Since the concept is so conveniently undefinable, its use rests only on any given gang's ability to proclaim that "The public, c'est moi"--and to maintain the claim at the point of a gun."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982)

"One of the methods used by statists to destroy capitalism consists in establishing controls that tie a given industry hand and foot, making it unable to solve its problems, then declaring that freedom has failed and stronger controls are necessary."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982), 1975

"It is not society, nor any social right, that forbids you to kill--but the inalienable individual right of another man to live."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Textbook of Americanism, The Ayn Rand Column, 85.

"See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. Then abolish that law without delay... No legal plunder; this is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, harmony and logic."
Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850)

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
The 10th Amendment

"Every form of happiness is private. Our greatest moments are personal, self-motivated, not to be touched."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982)

"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 (1905-1982)

"I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample underfoot."
Horace Greeley (1811-1872)

"The one who compels his neighbor... treats him, not as a being with reason, but as an animal in whom reason is not."
Auberon Herbert (1838-1906)

"How should it happen that the individual should be without rights, but the combination of individuals should possess unlimited rights?"
Auberon Herbert (1838-1906)

"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law,' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual."
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

"No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him."
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

"The United States was constituted to protect the moral principle of individual rights."
Vladimir Kornea (b.1979)

"What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving."
Adrian Rogers (1931-2005)

"A government costs what it spends."
Vladimir Kornea (b.1979)

"The purpose of life is to thrive."
Vladimir Kornea (b.1979)

"No one lies so boldly as the man who is indignant."
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

"The worst tempered people I have ever met were those who knew that they were wrong."
Wilson Mizner

"We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive."
C. S. Lewis (1898-1963)

"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

"[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

"Pride abhors the unearned."
Vladimir Kornea (b.1979)

"Soul: moral integrity."
Vladimir Kornea (b.1979)

"Property does not exist because there are laws, but laws exist because there is property."
Frédéric Bastiat

"All honor to Jefferson--to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression."
Abraham Lincoln

"The concept of individual rights is so prodigious a feat of political thinking that few men grasp it fully--and two hundred years have not been enough for other countries to understand it."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982)

"If I correct my vice, I admit to having been wrong."
Vladimir Kornea (b.1979)

"It is no virtue to be consistent with one's past mistakes."
Vladimir Kornea (b.1979)

"The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but under the name of liberalism they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without ever knowing how it happened."
Norman Thomas (1884-1968), six-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America

"Those politicians, professors and union bosses who curse big business are fighting for a lower standard of living."
Ludwig Von Mises

"Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own."
Robert Heinlein

"Some people admire men and women of integrity; others are made nervous--they experience an unspoken sense of reproach."
Nathaniel Branden

"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 (1905-1982)

"A majority vote is not an epistemological validation of an idea. Voting is merely a proper political device--within a strictly, constitutionally delimited sphere of action--for choosing the practical means of implementing a society's basic principles. But those principles are not determined by vote."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982)

"When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns--or dollars. Take your choice--there is no other--and your time is running out."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982) as Francisco D'Anconia, Atlas Shrugged

"All the reasons which made the *initiation* of physical force evil, make the *retaliatory* use of physical force a moral imperative."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982)

"To understand the nature of concepts is to see through the Matrix."
Vladimir Kornea (b.1979)

"There are two ways to conquer and enslave a nation. One is by the sword. The other is by debt."
John Adams

"I'd rather make the gravest of mistakes than surrender my own judgment."
James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) as Cora in The Last of the Mohicans

"People that say money can't buy happiness have yet to figure out what makes them happy."
Berkley Jolly

"If the history of animals were recorded, the most ferocious species would not equal the carnage perpetrated by man when they choose force as their means of dealing with one another."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982), 1972

"Reality is concrete, perceived by our senses, conceptualized by our minds, integrated into knowledge, including ethics, the highest abstraction possible, the principled answer to the permanent question: What should I do?"
Vladimir Kornea (b.1979)

"A free people claim their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate."
Thomas Jefferson

"All is disgust when one leaves his own nature and does things that misfit it."
Sophocles (5th Century BC)

"You find meaning in the self-directed achievement of that which you have affirmed as good or important."
Peter Saint-Andre

"The failure to give to a man what had never belonged to him can hardly be described as "sacrificing his interests.""
Ayn Rand (1905-1982), "The ‘Conflicts' of Men's Interests", The Virtue of Selfishness, p56

"Mystics who engage in murder because God told them so are an object of scorn to collectivists who engage in theft because society told them so."
Vladimir Kornea (b.1979)

"Today, wanting someone else's money is called 'need,' wanting to keep your own money is called 'greed,' and 'compassion' is when politicians arrange the transfer."
Joe Sobran

"Command nature. Reject the commands of God, whim, and men."
Andy Clarkson

"When it comes to individual rights violations, the difference between "never" and "sometimes" is the difference between "never" and "whenever"."
Vladimir Kornea (b.1979)

"Your future requires you to acknowledge your past mistakes and to pronounce an emphatic NO to that which made them possible."
Vladimir Kornea (b.1979)

"No. Not even in the face of armageddon. Never compromise."
Rorschach, Watchmen

"If man is to value life, he must value virtue; if he is to value himself, he must act according to virtue."
Vladimir Kornea (b.1979)

"When you have dedicated your life to a lie, to accept the truth means to accept that you have wasted your life."
Unknown

"To act contrary to a principle is to destroy the principle; to reclaim it costs guilt."
Vladimir Kornea (b.1979)

"When we see ourselves in a situation which must be endured and gone through, it is best to make up our minds to it. Meet it with firmness, and accommodate everything to it in the best way practicable. This lessens the evil, while fretting and fuming only serves to increase our own torment."
Thomas Jefferson

"I refuse to accept as guilt the fact of my own existence and the fact that I must work in order to support it. I refuse to accept as guilt the fact that I am able to do it and to do it well. I refuse to accept as guilt the fact that I am able to do it better than most people--the fact that my work is of greater value than the work of my neighbors and that more men are willing to pay me. I refuse to apologize for my ability--I refuse to apologize for my success--I refuse to apologize for my money. If this is evil, make the most of it. If this is what the public finds harmful to its interests, let the public destroy me. This is my code--and I will accept no other. [...] It is not your particular policy that I challenge, but your moral premise. If it were true that men could achieve their good by means of turning some men into sacrificial animals, and I were asked to immolate myself for the sake of creatures who wanted to survive at the price of my blood, if I were asked to serve the interests of society apart from, above and against my own--I would refuse, I would reject it as the most contemptible evil, I would fight it with every power I possess, I would fight the whole of mankind, if one minute were all I could last before I were murdered, I would fight in the full confidence of the justice of my battle and of a living being's right to exist. Let there be no misunderstanding about me. If it is now the belief of my fellow men, who call themselves the public, that their good requires victims, then I say: The public good be damned, I will have no part of it!"
Ayn Rand (1905-1982) as Hank Rearden in Atlas Shrugged

"The whole idea of our government is this: If enough people get together and act in concert, they can take something and not pay for it."
P. J. O'Rourke

"Consider the reasons which make us certain that we are right but not the fact that we are certain. If you are not convinced, ignore our certainty. Don't be tempted to substitute our judgment for your own."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982) as Hugh Akston, Atlas Shrugged

"There's nothing of any importance in life--except how well you do your work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are, will come from that. It's the only measure of human value. All the codes of ethics they'll try to ram down your throat are just so much paper money put out by swindlers to fleece people of their virtues. The code of competence is the only system of morality that's on a gold standard."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982) as Francisco D'Anconia, Atlas Shrugged

"Why had she always felt that joyous sense of confidence when looking at machines?--she thought. In these giant shapes, two aspects pertaining to the inhuman were radiantly absent: the causeless and the purposeless. Every part of the motors was an embodied answer to "Why?" and "What for?"--like the steps of a life-course chosen by the sort of mind she worshipped. The motors were a moral code cast in steel."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982) as Dagny Taggart, Atlas Shrugged

"Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon."
Winston S. Churchill

"We are more often treacherous through weakness than through calculation."
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

"He who enjoys doing and enjoys what he has done is happy."
Goethe

"Rash men are precipitate, and wish for dangers beforehand but draw back when they are in them, while brave men are keen in the moment of action, but quiet beforehand."
Aristotle (384BC-322BC), Nicomachean Ethics

"Actions are in the class of particulars."
Aristotle (384BC-322BC), Nicomachean Ethics

"If, before undertaking some action, you must obtain the permission of society--you are not free, whether such permission is granted to you or not. Only a slave acts on permission. A permission is not a right."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982)

"Man's basic vice, the source of all his evils, is the act of unfocusing his mind, the suspension of his consciousness, which is not blindness, but the refusal to see, not ignorance, but the refusal to know. Irrationality is the rejection of man's means of survival and, therefore, a commitment to a course of blind destruction; that which is anti-mind, is anti-life."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982)

"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money."
Alexis de Tocqueville

"Observe ... that no one ever speaks of tolerating rationality or honesty or integrity or productiveness. No one ever speaks of tolerating cultures that respect rights and uphold the rule of law. The objects allegedly deserving tolerance are invariably the irrational, the dishonest, the unjust, the parasitic, the rights violating, the murderous, the tyrannical."
Craig Biddle

"An emotion that clashes with your reason, an emotion that you cannot explain or control, is only the carcass of that stale thinking which you forbade your mind to revise."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Atlas Shrugged

"The generality of mankind seek their own good and hold that this is their proper business."
Aristotle (384BC-322BC), Nicomachean Ethics

"The man who is without qualification good at deliberating is the man who is capable of aiming in accordance with calculation at the best for man of things attainable by action."
Aristotle (384BC-322BC), Nicomachean Ethics

"Many conservatives decided to choose religion as their moral justification. They are claiming that freedom, capitalism, and America are based on faith in God. Politically, such a claim contradicts the fundamental principles of The United States. In America, religion is a private matter and must not be brought into political issues. Intellectually, to rest one's case on faith is to concede that reason is the side of one's enemies."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982), "AYN RAND's message to GLENN BECK", YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTf6NK0wsiA

"All that can fall within the compass of human understanding, being either, first, the nature of things, as they are in themselves, their relations, and their manner of operation: or, secondly, that which man himself ought to do, as a rational and voluntary agent, for the attainment of any end, especially happiness: or, thirdly, the ways and means whereby the knowledge of both the one and the other of these is attained and communicated; I think science may be divided properly into these three sorts."
John Locke

"Objective means--in effect--a volitional adherence to reality in the process of forming your mental content."
Leonard Peikoff

"A close second to "Check your premises" is "Check your facts.""
Amber Pawlik

"An error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982)

"We cannot fight against collectivism, unless we fight against its moral base: altruism. We cannot fight against altruism, unless we fight against its epistemological base: irrationalism. 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 (1905-1982)

"I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer."
Benjamin Franklin, On the Price of Corn and the Management of the Poor, 1776 ¹

"The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools."
Herbert Spencer (1820-1903)

"none of the moral virtues arises in us by nature; for nothing that exists by nature can form a habit contrary to its nature. For instance the stone which by nature moves downwards cannot be habituated to move upwards, not even if one tries to train it by throwing it up ten thousand times; nor can fire be habituated to move downwards, nor can anything else that by nature behaves in one way be trained to behave in another. Neither by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do the virtues arise in us; rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit."
Aristotle (384BC-322BC)

"From now until the end of time no one else will ever see life with my eyes."
Christopher Morley, 1890 - 1957

"Reconciliation should be accompanied by justice, otherwise it will not last. While we all hope for peace it shouldn't be peace at any cost but peace based on principle, on justice."
Corazon Cojuangco Aquino (b.1933)

"Evil is the cure for incompetence."
Scott Adams

"The profoundest guilt is the evasion of earned guilt."
Vladimir Kornea (b.1979)

"Know thyself and thou shalt know all the mysteries of the gods and the universe."
Temple of Apollo at Delphi

"I am going to choose my next action as perfectly as an action can be chosen; I will then do that action as perfectly as such an action can be done."
Vladimir Kornea (b.1979)

"There is no road too long to the man who advances deliberately and without undue haste; there are no honors too distant to the man who prepares himself for them with patience."
Jean de la Bruyere

"Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances."
Thomas Jefferson

"If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been owing more to patient attention, than to any other talent."
Isaac Newton

"He that can have patience can have what he will."
Benjamin Franklin

"Who ever is out of patience is out of possession of his soul."
Francis Bacon

"That's what governments are for - getting in a man's way."
Firefly, "Serenity"

"It is far more useful to be aware of a single shortcoming in ourselves than it is to be aware of a thousand in somebody else. For when the fault is our own, we are in a position to correct it."
The Dalai Lama

"I should do something because if I do so, then after the fact, I will have done it, and that's better than the alternative."
Vladimir Kornea (b.1979)

"There are four boxes to be used in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury and ammo. Please use in that order."
Unknown

"I think myself that we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious."
Thomas Jefferson letter to William Ludlow, 1824

"Philosophy is a vehicle--in order to have traction it must have contact with the ground, else it's just spinning its wheels."
Vladimir Kornea (b.1979)

"Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent."
Adam Smith

"The logic that permits a person to call down God's wrath on anyone for displaying a bit of God's own handiwork does, we must admit, escape us. If the human body—far and away the most remarkable, the most complicated, the most perfect and the most beautiful creation on this earth—can become objectionable, obscene or abhorrent, when purposely posed and photographed to capture that remarkable perfection and beauty, then the world is a far more cockeyed place than we are willing to admit."
Hugh Hefner

"To withhold your contempt from men's vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982)

"Let me define the difference between economic power and political power: 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 (1905-1982), Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 47

"It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself."
Thomas Jefferson

"I want the people of America to be able to work less for the government and more for themselves. I want them to have the rewards of their own industry. This is the chief meaning of freedom."
Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933)

"A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business."
Eric Hoffer, The True Believer (1951)

"Suffering as such is not a value; only man's fight against suffering is."
Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Atlas Shrugged

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