"A is A" - Aristotle
"If a man says that A is true, and also not-A is true, then he is really nothing but a cabbage-head." - Aristotle
"Just remember, next time you pass a bank with conventional Greek columns before it, that you are beholding an imitation in concrete of an imitation in stone of a simple wooden log." - L. Sprague de Camp, The Ancient Engineers
"Rights don't enforce themselves--and we don't have the option of dressing Ayn Rand up in a Superman costume and having her enforce them for us". - David Friedman
"The person who developed Objectivism was after all a woman, but I can sympathize with how hard it is in this age of anti-reason to find a woman who shares the same genuine and rational love of life - especially when schools breed such contempt for the nobility of man." - Terry Goodkind, on finding rational women
"On reading this, one tends to feel...exhilarated." - Alan Greenspan, on Atlas Shrugged
"Passion, Romance and Capitalism all sit in the same place on my tongue. And they taste very sweet." - Jonathan Hoenig
"Who is John Galt?" - Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
"Are we to understand, asked the judge, "that you hold your own interests above the interests of the public?"
"I hold that such a question can never arise except in a society of cannibals." - Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged"An emotion as such tells you nothing about reality, beyond the fact that something makes you feel something." - Ayn Rand, 'Philosophical Detection' Philosophy; Who Needs It
"Do not make the mistake...of thinking that a worker is a slave and that he holds his job by his employer's permission. He does not hold it by permission - but by contract, that is, by a voluntary mutual agreement. A worker can quit his job; a slave cannot." - Ayn Rand, "Textbook of Americanism"
"Face a challenge and find joy in the capacity to meet it." - Ayn Rand, quoted by Dr. Robert C. Atkins
"Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where the gun begins." - Ayn Rand
"If some men are entitled by right to the products of the work of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labor. Any alleged "right" of one man, which necessitates the violation of the rights of another, is not and cannot be a right. No man can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation, an unrewarded duty or an involuntary servitude on another man. There can be no such thing as 'the right to enslave.'" - Ayn Rand, "Man's Rights," The Virtue of Selfishness
"If there is no black and white, there can be no gray, since gray is a mixture of the two." - Ayn Rand
"Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual)." - Ayn Rand
"It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there's someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master." - Ayn Rand
"Live a life as a monument to your soul." - Ayn Rand
"Man will always be attracted to the woman who reflects the deepest vision of himself, the woman whose surrender permits him to experience - or to fake - a sense of self esteem. The man who is proudly certain of his own value, will want the highest type of woman he can find, the woman he admires, the strongest, the hardest to conquer - because only the possession of a heroine will give him the sense of an achievement, not the possession of a brainless slut." - Ayn Rand
"The moral justification of capitalism does not lie in the altruist claim that it represents the best way to achieve the 'common good.' It is true that capitalism does-if that catch phrase has any meaning-but this is merely a secondary consequence. The moral justification for capitalism lies in the fact that it is the only system consonant with man's rational nature, that it protects man's survival qua man, and that its ruling principle is justice." - Ayn Rand
"There can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob." - Ayn Rand
"There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist." - Ayn Rand
"There is only one source of authentic self-confidence: reason." - Ayn Rand
"To deal with men by force is as impractical as to deal with nature by persuasion." - Ayn Rand
"Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product is a slave." - Ayn Rand
"People think a liar gains victory over his victim. What I've learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one's reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one's master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person's view requires to be faked. And if one gains the immediate purpose of the lie -- the price one pays is the destruction of that which the gain was intended to serve. The man who lies to the world, is the world's slave from then on." - Henry Rearden (in Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand)
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
"Oh it took me a long time to come to this
And I have chosen my path
I am only for me" - Guster, Eden"I don't do what people tell me to do; I do what's in my best interest. Sometimes they are the same." - Gregoire
"I have sworn... eternal hostility to every form of tryanny to the mind of man." - Thomas Jefferson
Floated back down, 'cause he wanted to share...
The key to the locks on the chains he saw...everywhere...
But first he was stripped, then he was stabbed
By faceless men, well fuck 'em. He still stands...
- Pearl Jam, Given to Fly"You start to ask why is Silicon Valley rich? The answer is free minds and free markets... Freedom and free markets are closely tied to what this country is all about." - TJ Rodgers
"Anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. I live on the twenty-first floor" - Alan Sokal
"There is a real world; its properties are not merely social constructions; facts and evidence do matter. What sane person would contend otherwise? And yet, much contemporary academic theorizing consists precisely of attempts to blur these obvious truths -- the utter absurdity of it all being concealed through obscure and pretentious language." - Alan Sokal
"There's something magical about that moment when you're an 18-20yr old & have spent almost all of your life within a school curriculum. There's a deep, hard-to-articulate yearning for intellectual freedom, heroism, and the subtle difference between doing things right and doing the right thing. And bam!, someone hands you a copy of Atlas Shrugged and it feels like it was written just for you." - Vinod
"The point I’m trying to make is that, as an Objectivist, it takes more than a nice rack to keep me interested in a girl. She must also have a nice ass. And what I mean by that is, she has to have a particular outlook on life. She doesn’t necessarily have to explicitly share my philosophy, but I can’t be with someone who doesn’t hold similar values, who doesn’t see life the way I do" - Don Watkins
"When you stop striving for perfection, you might as well be dead." - Nip/Tuck
"Canada violates the Axiom of Identity and is incompatible with Objectivism." - Ayn Rand SOMAD, Forum3000
"How dare you call capitalists "scum"? Your objectivist license is REVOKED." - Ayn Rand SOMAD, Forum3000
"Kelley is a criminal. He is a lowlife, a piece of shit, a pile of rubbish, a smelly cow's fart, the dung of an elephant, the smell of Kosak's penis, the moral equivalent of a shit fly." - Ayn Rand SOMAD, Forum3000