Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical.
- Blaise Pascal
Archive for the 'Philosophers' Category
Liberty and the priest
Published by 1 year, 7 months ago in Philosophers and Politicians. 0 CommentsIn every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.
- Thomas Jefferson
The source of sexual attraction
Published by 1 year, 7 months ago in Books, Novelists and Philosophers. 0 CommentsThe men who think that wealth comes from material resources and has no intellectual root or meaning, are the same men who think — for the same reason — that sex is a physical capacity which functions independently of one’s mind, choices or code of values. They think that your body creates a desire and makes a choice for you — just about in some such way as if iron ore transformed itself into railroad rails of its own volition. Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. But, in fact, a man’s sexual choice is the result and the sum of his fundamental convictions. Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life.
- Francisco d’Anconia, Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
A man’s maturity consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child, at play.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.
- Bertrand Russell
If a man sets out to hate all the miserable creatures he meets, he will not have much energy left for anything else; whereas he can despise them, one and all, with the greatest ease.
- Arthur Schopenhauer
Of liberty I would say that, in the whole plentitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will. But 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
Selfishness: what a real compliment is like
Published by 1 year, 7 months ago in Books, Novelists and Philosophers. 0 CommentsAnd 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
And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not.
- Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death
Pure evil: the insistence on always doing right as "vanity"
Published by 1 year, 7 months ago in Books, Novelists and Philosophers. 0 CommentsThat’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
The right thing at the right time ain’t easy…
Published by 1 year, 7 months ago in Philosophers and Scientists. 0 CommentsAnybody can become angry - that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.
- Aristotle
A moral commandment
Published by 1 year, 7 months ago in Books, Novelists and Philosophers. 0 CommentsIf 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
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
- Epicurus
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
Surrendering to evil
Published by 1 year, 8 months ago in Books, Novelists and Philosophers. 0 CommentsWhen 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
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