And so I didn’t come here to do you a favor or because I felt sorry for you or because you need a job pretty badly. I came for a simple, selfish reason — the same reason that makes a man choose the cleanest food he can find. It’s a law of survival, isn’t it? — to seek the best. I didn’t come for your sake. I came for mine.
- Howard Roark, The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
I walked in a desert.
And I cried,
“Ah, God, take me from this place!”
A voice said, “It is no desert.”
I cried, “Well, But –
The sand, the heat, the vacant horizon.”
A voice said, “It is no desert.”
- Stephen Crane, The Black Riders and Other Lines
That’s the conceit I’m talking about — the idea that it matters who’s right or wrong. It’s the most insufferable form of vanity, this insistence on always doing right. How do you know what’s right? How can anyone ever know it? It’s nothing but a delusion to flatter your own ego and to hurt other people by flaunting your superiority over them.
- Lillian Rearden, Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
Did I say something wrong? Sorry, pardon me for breathing which I never do anyway so I don’t know why I bother to say it. Oh, God, I’m so depressed!
- Marvin, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man’s only moral commandment is: Thou shalt think. But a moral commandment is a contradiction in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed.
- John Galt, Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
I saw a man pursuing the horizon;
Round and round they sped.
I was disturbed at this;
I accosted the man.
“It is futile,” I said,
“You can never — ”“You lie,” he cried,
And ran on.
- Stephen Crane, The Black Riders and Other Lines
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.
- Abdul Alhazred, Necronomicon, H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
(yes, it’s a book mentioned in another book!)
The so-called Christian nations are the most enlightened and progressive - but in spite of their religion, not because of it. The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetic in childbirth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve. And every step in astronomy and geology ever taken has been opposed by bigotry and superstition. The Greeks surpassed us in artistic culture and in architecture five hundred years before the Christian religion was born.
- Mark Twain
The good, say the mystics, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man’s power to conceive - a definition that invalidates man’s consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence. Man’s mind, say the mystics, must be subordinated to the will of God. Man’s standard of value say the mystics, is the pleasure of God, whose standards are beyond man’s comprehension and must be accepted on faith.
Thus, the purpose of man’s life is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question.
- John Galt, Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
When they yell that it is selfish to be certain that you are right, you hasten to assure that you’re certain of nothing. When they shout that it’s immoral to stand on your convictions, you assure them that you have no convictions whatever. When the thugs of Europe’s People’s States snarl that you are guilty of intolerance, because you don’t treat your desire to live and their desire to kill you as a difference of opinion — you cringe and hasten to assure them that you are not intolerant of any horror. When some barefoot bum in some pesthole of Asia yells at you: How dare you be rich — you apologize and beg him to be patient and promise him you’ll give it all away.
- John Galt, Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
The Babel fish is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy not from its carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish. “Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindboggingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
The argument goes something like this: ‘I refuse to prove that I exist,’ says God, ‘for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.’ ‘But,’ says Man, ‘the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.’ ‘Oh dear,’ says God, ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ and promptly vanished in a puff of logic.’
‘Oh, that was easy,’ says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo’s kidneys, but that didn’t stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his best- selling book Well, That About Wraps It Up For God.
Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.
- The Book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
- H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.
- Ayn Rand
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
- Arthur C. Clarke
Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.
- Isaac Asimov
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