"Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled." - Matthew 5:6
"Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours." - Mark 11:24
"Every time someone cries out in prayer and I can't answer, I feel guilty about not being God." - Eliezer Yudkowsky
"The difficulty, my friends, is not in avoiding death, but in avoiding unrighteousness; for that runs faster than death." - Socrates
"Righteousness is the ability to stand in the presence of YHWH without a sense of sin, guilt, condemnation, inferiority or fear." - E.W. Kenyon
If there is righteousness in the heart,
there will be beauty in the character.
If there is beauty in the character,
there will be harmony in the home.
If there is harmony in the home,
there will be order in the nation.
If there is order in the nation,
there will be peace in the world.
So let it be.
- Scottish Proverb
"But goodness alone is never enough. A hard, cold wisdom is required for goodness to accomplish good. Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil." - Robert Heinlein (SISL)
"The specialist makes no small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy." - Marshall McLuhan
"You need to detach most when it seems the least likely or possible thing to do. Detach. Detach in love, or detach in anger, but strive for detachment." - Melody Beattie
"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" - Franklin D. Roosevelt
I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.
- Dune
"If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your own estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment." - Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor
"Prohibit the taking of omens, and do away with superstitious doubts. Then, until death itself comes, no calamity need be feared." - Sun Tzu
"Pain doesn't tell you when you ought to stop. Pain is the little voice in your head that tries to hold you back because it knows if you continue you will change. Don't let it stop you from being who you can be. Exhaustion tells you when you ought to stop. You only reach your limit when you can go no further." - Unknown
"In a sense, stopping mind control and healing are the same." - Neil Brick
"Self-respect is the fruit of discipline; the sense of dignity grows with the ability to say no to oneself." - Abraham J. Heschel
"False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil." - Socrates
"The truly weak spread venom, the truly strong digest it" - Shai Hulud
"In the face of criticism and ridicule, don't work harder to prove someone wrong; work harder to defeat the part of you that actually believes it." - Unknown
"On some positions, Cowardice asks the question, "Is it safe?" Expediency asks the question, "Is it politic?" And Vanity comes along and asks the question, "Is it popular?" But Conscience asks the question "Is it right?" And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must do it because Conscience tells him it is right." - Martin Luther King, Jr
"I don't need a friend. I need somebody who will do the right thing." - David Palmer, 24
"If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?" - John Wooden
"Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem to be more afraid of life than death." - James F. Byrnes
"Cowards die many times before their deaths, The valiant never taste of death but once." - Shakespeare
"Be careful of this sort of argument, any time you find yourself defining the "winner" as someone other than the agent who is currently smiling from on top of a giant heap of utility." - Eliezer Yudkowsky
"He who has a why to live can bear with any how" - Nietzsche
"Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it." - Gandhi
"Your heart is free. Have the courage to follow it." - Malcolm Wallace (dead), Braveheart
"Just a few centuries ago, the smartest humans alive were dead wrong about damn near everything. They were wrong about gods. Wrong about astronomy. Wrong about disease. Wrong about heredity. Wrong about physics. Wrong about racism, sexism, nationalism, governance, and many other moral issues. Wrong about geology. Wrong about cosmology. Wrong about chemistry. Wrong about evolution. Wrong about nearly every subject imaginable." - Luke Muehlhauser
"Very recently - in just the last few decades - the human species has acquired a great deal of new knowledge about human rationality. The most salient example would be the heuristics and biases program in experimental psychology. There is also the Bayesian systematization of probability theory and statistics; evolutionary psychology; social psychology. Experimental investigations of empirical human psychology; and theoretical probability theory to interpret what our experiments tell us; and evolutionary theory to explain the conclusions. These fields give us new focusing lenses through which to view the landscape of our own minds. With their aid, we may be able to see more clearly the muscles of our brains, the fingers of thought as they move. We have a shared vocabulary in which to describe problems and solutions. Humanity may finally be ready to synthesize the martial art of mind: to refine, share, systematize, and pass on techniques of personal rationality." - Eliezer Yudkowsky
"Rationality means the recognition and acceptance of reason as one's only source of knowledge, one's only judge of values and one's only guide to action. It means one's total commitment to a state of full, conscious awareness, to the maintenance of a full mental focus in all issues, in all choices, in all of one's waking hours" - Ayn Rand
"This means the application of reason to every aspect of one's life and concerns. It means choosing and validation one's opinions, one's decision, one's work, one's love, in accordance with the normal requirements of a cognitive process, the requirements of logic, objectivity, integration. Put negatively, the virtue means never placing any consideration above one's perception of reality. This includes never attempting to get away with a contradiction, a mystic fantasy, or an indulgence in context-dropping." - Leonard Peikoff
"One case of true curiosity had the same sort of redeeming power in rationality that one case of true love had in movies." - Eliezer Yudkowsky
"Science is neither a philosophy nor a belief system. It is a combination of mental operations that has become increasingly the habit of educated peoples, a culture of illuminations hit upon by a fortunate turn of history that yielded the most effective way of learning about the real world ever conceived." - Academician Prokhor Zakharov (from Sid Meier's 'Alpha Centauri')
"Yes, I once asked Dr. Cole about that, and he said there was no scientific answer. Then I asked if there was an unscientific answer? And he said: ‘Well, there will be if you make one up’." - Albert the Golden Retriever (from a story by Nick Bostrom)
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing it, does not go away." - Philip K. Dick
"Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed." - Francis Bacon
"That which can be destroyed by the truth should be." - P.C. Hodgell
"Outside our heads there is a freestanding reality. Only madmen and a scattering of constructivist philosophers doubt its existence." - Prokhor Zakharov
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
"What exactly do you mean by ‘machine’, such that humans are not machines?" - Eliezer Yudkowsky
"But I am not an object. I am not a noun, I am an adjective. I am the way matter behaves when it is organized in a John K. Clark-ish way. At the present time only one chunk of matter in the universe behaves that way; someday that could change." - John K. Clark
"Beginning to reason is like stepping onto an escalator that leads upward and out of sight. Once we take the first step, the distance to be travelled is independent of our will and we cannot know in advance where we shall end." - Peter Singer
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke
"Nobody notices "sci-fi" when it is actually happening."- James Rogers, SL4.org
"Reality is just a crutch for people who can't handle science fiction." - Unknown
"The popular stereotype of the researcher is that of a skeptic and a pessimist. Nothing could be further from the truth! Scientists must be optimists at heart, in order to block out the incessant chorus of those who say ‘It cannot be done.’" - Prokhor Zakharov
"Rocket science? That's the easy part: Even I can do that. It's the engineering that requires great skill and artistic genius." - Alan R. Fisher
"You can make a small program (say, 1,000 lines) work through brute force even when breaking every rule of good style. For a larger program, this is simply not so. If the structure of a 100,000-line program is bad, you will find that new errors are introduced as fast as old ones are removed." - Bjarne Stroustrup
Q. Why does "philosophy of consciousness/nature of reality" seem to interest you so much?
A. Take away consciousness and reality and there's not much left.
- Greg Egan, interview in Eidolon 15
"Ignorance exists in the map, not in the territory. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my own state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. To worship a phenomenon because it seems so wonderfully mysterious, is to worship your own ignorance." - Eliezer Yudkowsky
"For every type of ignorance there is some theoretical amount of formatting that will make it look brilliant." - Scott Adams, 'The Way of the Weasel'
"Furious activity is no substitute for understanding." - H. H. Williams
"The one-word explanation is a label with the virtue of a Rorschach inkblot; a researcher can read into it whatever he or she wishes to see. As long as they are plausible and remain unspecified, they are hard to falsify. The near omnipotence of one-word explanations does not, however, foster theory development." - Gerd Gigerenzer, 'Adaptive Thinking'
"There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking." -Alfred Korzybski
"Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts. Some of you like Pep rallies and plastic robots who tell you what to read." - Frank Zappa
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." - Robert Heinlein
"There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped." - G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
"That scream of horror and embarrassment is the sound that rationalists make when they level up." - Eliezer Yudkowsky
Twelve Virtues of Rationality
The first virtue is curiosity. A burning itch to know is higher than a solemn vow to pursue truth. To feel the burning itch of curiosity requires both that you be ignorant, and that you desire to relinquish your ignorance. If in your heart you believe you already know, or if in your heart you do not wish to know, then your questioning will be purposeless and your skills without direction. Curiosity seeks to annihilate itself; there is no curiosity that does not want an answer. The glory of glorious mystery is to be solved, after which it ceases to be mystery. Be wary of those who speak of being open-minded and modestly confess their ignorance. There is a time to confess your ignorance and a time to relinquish your ignorance.
The second virtue is relinquishment. P. C. Hodgell said: “That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.” Do not flinch from experiences that might destroy your beliefs. The thought you cannot think controls you more than thoughts you speak aloud. Submit yourself to ordeals and test yourself in fire. Relinquish the emotion which rests upon a mistaken belief, and seek to feel fully that emotion which fits the facts. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is hot, and it is cool, the Way opposes your fear. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is cool, and it is hot, the Way opposes your calm. Evaluate your beliefs first and then arrive at your emotions. Let yourself say: “If the iron is hot, I desire to believe it is hot, and if it is cool, I desire to believe it is cool.” Beware lest you become attached to beliefs you may not want.
The third virtue is lightness. Let the winds of evidence blow you about as though you are a leaf, with no direction of your own. Beware lest you fight a rearguard retreat against the evidence, grudgingly conceding each foot of ground only when forced, feeling cheated. Surrender to the truth as quickly as you can. Do this the instant you realize what you are resisting; the instant you can see from which quarter the winds of evidence are blowing against you. Be faithless to your cause and betray it to a stronger enemy. If you regard evidence as a constraint and seek to free yourself, you sell yourself into the chains of your whims. For you cannot make a true map of a city by sitting in your bedroom with your eyes shut and drawing lines upon paper according to impulse. You must walk through the city and draw lines on paper that correspond to what you see. If, seeing the city unclearly, you think that you can shift a line just a little to the right, just a little to the left, according to your caprice, this is just the same mistake.
The fourth virtue is evenness. One who wishes to believe says, “Does the evidence permit me to believe?” One who wishes to disbelieve asks, “Does the evidence force me to believe?” Beware lest you place huge burdens of proof only on propositions you dislike, and then defend yourself by saying: “But it is good to be skeptical.” If you attend only to favorable evidence, picking and choosing from your gathered data, then the more data you gather, the less you know. If you are selective about which arguments you inspect for flaws, or how hard you inspect for flaws, then every flaw you learn how to detect makes you that much stupider. If you first write at the bottom of a sheet of paper, “And therefore, the sky is green!”, it does not matter what arguments you write above it afterward; the conclusion is already written, and it is already correct or already wrong. To be clever in argument is not rationality but rationalization. Intelligence, to be useful, must be used for something other than defeating itself. Listen to hypotheses as they plead their cases before you, but remember that you are not a hypothesis, you are the judge. Therefore do not seek to argue for one side or another, for if you knew your destination, you would already be there.
The fifth virtue is argument. Those who wish to fail must first prevent their friends from helping them. Those who smile wisely and say: “I will not argue” remove themselves from help, and withdraw from the communal effort. In argument strive for exact honesty, for the sake of others and also yourself: The part of yourself that distorts what you say to others also distorts your own thoughts. Do not believe you do others a favor if you accept their arguments; the favor is to you. Do not think that fairness to all sides means balancing yourself evenly between positions; truth is not handed out in equal portions before the start of a debate. You cannot move forward on factual questions by fighting with fists or insults. Seek a test that lets reality judge between you.
The sixth virtue is empiricism. The roots of knowledge are in observation and its fruit is prediction. What tree grows without roots? What tree nourishes us without fruit? If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound? One says, “Yes it does, for it makes vibrations in the air.” Another says, “No it does not, for there is no auditory processing in any brain.” Though they argue, one saying “Yes”, and one saying “No”, the two do not anticipate any different experience of the forest. Do not ask which beliefs to profess, but which experiences to anticipate. Always know which difference of experience you argue about. Do not let the argument wander and become about something else, such as someone’s virtue as a rationalist. Jerry Cleaver said: “What does you in is not failure to apply some high-level, intricate, complicated technique. It’s overlooking the basics. Not keeping your eye on the ball.” Do not be blinded by words. When words are subtracted, anticipation remains.
The seventh virtue is simplicity. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said: “Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” Simplicity is virtuous in belief, design, planning, and justification. When you profess a huge belief with many details, each additional detail is another chance for the belief to be wrong. Each specification adds to your burden; if you can lighten your burden you must do so. There is no straw that lacks the power to break your back. Of artifacts it is said: The most reliable gear is the one that is designed out of the machine. Of plans: A tangled web breaks. A chain of a thousand links will arrive at a correct conclusion if every step is correct, but if one step is wrong it may carry you anywhere. In mathematics a mountain of good deeds cannot atone for a single sin. Therefore, be careful on every step.
The eighth virtue is humility. To be humble is to take specific actions in anticipation of your own errors. To confess your fallibility and then do nothing about it is not humble; it is boasting of your modesty. Who are most humble? Those who most skillfully prepare for the deepest and most catastrophic errors in their own beliefs and plans. Because this world contains many whose grasp of rationality is abysmal, beginning students of rationality win arguments and acquire an exaggerated view of their own abilities. But it is useless to be superior: Life is not graded on a curve. The best physicist in ancient Greece could not calculate the path of a falling apple. There is no guarantee that adequacy is possible given your hardest effort; therefore spare no thought for whether others are doing worse. If you compare yourself to others you will not see the biases that all humans share. To be human is to make ten thousand errors. No one in this world achieves perfection.
The ninth virtue is perfectionism. The more errors you correct in yourself, the more you notice. As your mind becomes more silent, you hear more noise. When you notice an error in yourself, this signals your readiness to seek advancement to the next level. If you tolerate the error rather than correcting it, you will not advance to the next level and you will not gain the skill to notice new errors. In every art, if you do not seek perfection you will halt before taking your first steps. If perfection is impossible that is no excuse for not trying. Hold yourself to the highest standard you can imagine, and look for one still higher. Do not be content with the answer that is almost right; seek one that is exactly right.
The tenth virtue is precision. One comes and says: The quantity is between 1 and 100. Another says: the quantity is between 40 and 50. If the quantity is 42 they are both correct, but the second prediction was more useful and exposed itself to a stricter test. What is true of one apple may not be true of another apple; thus more can be said about a single apple than about all the apples in the world. The narrowest statements slice deepest, the cutting edge of the blade. As with the map, so too with the art of mapmaking: The Way is a precise Art. Do not walk to the truth, but dance. On each and every step of that dance your foot comes down in exactly the right spot. Each piece of evidence shifts your beliefs by exactly the right amount, neither more nor less. What is exactly the right amount? To calculate this you must study probability theory. Even if you cannot do the math, knowing that the math exists tells you that the dance step is precise and has no room in it for your whims.
The eleventh virtue is scholarship. Study many sciences and absorb their power as your own. Each field that you consume makes you larger. If you swallow enough sciences the gaps between them will diminish and your knowledge will become a unified whole. If you are gluttonous you will become vaster than mountains. It is especially important to eat math and science which impinges upon rationality: Evolutionary psychology, heuristics and biases, social psychology, probability theory, decision theory. But these cannot be the only fields you study. The Art must have a purpose other than itself, or it collapses into infinite recursion.
Before these eleven virtues is a virtue which is nameless.
Miyamoto Musashi wrote, in The Book of Five Rings:
“The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy’s cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him. More than anything, you must be thinking of carrying your movement through to cutting him.”
Every step of your reasoning must cut through to the correct answer in the same movement. More than anything, you must think of carrying your map through to reflecting the territory.
If you fail to achieve a correct answer, it is futile to protest that you acted with propriety.
How can you improve your conception of rationality? Not by saying to yourself, “It is my duty to be rational.” By this you only enshrine your mistaken conception. Perhaps your conception of rationality is that it is rational to believe the words of the Great Teacher, and the Great Teacher says, “The sky is green,” and you look up at the sky and see blue. If you think: “It may look like the sky is blue, but rationality is to believe the words of the Great Teacher,” you lose a chance to discover your mistake.
Do not ask whether it is “the Way” to do this or that. Ask whether the sky is blue or green. If you speak overmuch of the Way you will not attain it.
You may try to name the highest principle with names such as “the map that reflects the territory” or “experience of success and failure” or “Bayesian decision theory”. But perhaps you describe incorrectly the nameless virtue. How will you discover your mistake? Not by comparing your description to itself, but by comparing it to that which you did not name.
If for many years you practice the techniques and submit yourself to strict constraints, it may be that you will glimpse the center. Then you will see how all techniques are one technique, and you will move correctly without feeling constrained. Musashi wrote: “When you appreciate the power of nature, knowing the rhythm of any situation, you will be able to hit the enemy naturally and strike naturally. All this is the Way of the Void.”
These then are twelve virtues of rationality:
Curiosity, relinquishment, lightness, evenness, argument, empiricism, simplicity, humility, perfectionism, precision, scholarship, and the void.
Less Wrong - A community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality http://lesswrong.com/
PHILOSOPHY
all quotes attributed to Ayn Rand unless otherwise specified
"Indeed, the PhD physicist technically has a Doctorate of Philosophy. However, generally people who call themselves "philosophers" nowadays are essentially proponents of failed schools of philosophical thought which science left by the wayside a long time ago and who now spend their time railing against the victors." - Mike Wong, stardestroyer.net
"Philosophy is the goal toward which religion was only a helplessly blind groping. The grandeur, the reverence, the exalted purity, the austere dedication to the pursuit of truth and morality, which are commonly associated with religion, should properly belong to the field of philosophy."
"At first, man was enslaved by the gods. But he broke their chains. Then he was enslaved by the kings. But he broke their chains. He was enslaved by his birth, by his kin, by his race. But he broke their chains. He declared to all his brothers that a man has rights which neither god nor king nor other men can take away from him, no matter what their number, for his is the right of man, and there is no right on earth above this right."
"Sebastián d' Anconia, his ancestor, had left Spain many centuries ago, at a time when Spain was the most powerful country on earth and his was one of Spain's proudest figures. He left, because the lord of the Inquisition did not approve of this manner of thinking and suggested, at a court banquet, that he change it. Sebastian d' Anconia threw the contents of his wine glass at the face of the lord of the Inquisition, and escaped before he could be seized. He left behind him his fortune, his estate, his marble palace and the girl he loved- and he sailed to a new world." - Atlas Shrugged
"Lois Cook said that words must be freed from the oppression of reason. She said the stranglehold of reason upon words is like the exploitation of the masses by the capitalists. Words must be permitted to negotiate with reason through collective bargaining." - The Fountainhead
"Causality is a bourgeois myth" - ctrl_y, objectivismonline.net, summarizing Sartre's metaphysics
"We have never made an effort to understand what is greatness in man and how to recognize it. We have come to hold, in a kind of mawkish stupor, that greatness is to be gauged by self-sacrifice. Self-sacrifice, we drool, is the ultimate virtue. Let’s stop and think for a moment. Is sacrifice a virtue? Can a man sacrifice his integrity? His honor? His freedom? His ideal? His convictions? The honesty of his feelings? The independence of his thought? But these are a man’s supreme possessions. Anything he gives up for them is not a sacrifice but an easy bargain. They, however, are above sacrificing to any cause or consideration whatsoever. Should we not, then, stop preaching dangerous and vicious nonsense? Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that that cannot and must not be sacrificed. It is the unsacrificed self that we must respect in man above all." - Gail Wynand in The Fountainhead
"Peter, 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. Your own action, not any possible object of your charity. I'll be glad if people who need it find a better manner of living in a house I designed. But that's not the motive of my work. Nor my reason. Nor my reward."
"But egotists are not kind. And you are. You're the most egotistical and the kindest man I know. And that doesn't make sense."
"Maybe the concepts don't make sense. Maybe they don't mean what people have been taught to think they mean."
- Peter Keating and Howard Roark, The Fountainhead
"Now take a human body. Why wouldn't you like to see a human body with a curling tail with a crest of ostrich feathers at the end? And with ears shaped like acanthus leaves? It would be ornamental, you know, instead of the stark, bare ugliness we have now. Well, why don't you like the idea? Because it would be useless and pointless. Because the beauty of the human body is that it hasn't a single muscle which doesn't serve its purpose; that there's not a line wasted; that every detail of it fits one idea, the idea of a man and the life of a man."
"An honest man has to be of one piece and one faith; what constituted the life source, the idea in any existing thing or creature, and why - if one smallest part committed treason to that idea - the thing of the creature was dead; and why the good, the high and the noble on earth was only that which kept its integrity."
"Rules? Here are my rules: what can be done with one substance must never be done with another. No two materials are alike. No two sites on earth are alike. No two buildings have the same purpose. The purpose, the site, the material determine the shape. Nothing can be reasonable or beautiful unless it's made by one central idea, and the idea sets every detail. A building is alive, like a man. Its integrity is to follow its own truth, its one single theme, and to serve its own single purpose. A man doesn't borrow pieces of his body. A building doesn't borrow hunks of its soul. Its maker gives it the soul and every wall, window, and stairway to express it."
"The work of the creators has eliminated one form of disease after another, in man's body and spirit, and brought more relief from suffering than any altruist could ever conceive"
"The integrity of a man's creative work is of greater importance than any charitable endeavor" - Howard Roark, The Fountainhead
"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." - Francisco d' Anconia, Atlas Shrugged
"I don't like people who think or speak in terms of gaining anybody's confidence. If one's actions are honest, one does not need the predated confidence of others, only their rational perception. The person who craves a moral blank check of that kind, has dishonest intentions, whether he admits it to himself or not." - Francisco d' Anconia
"I am not committing the contemptible act of asking you to take me on faith" - Francisco d' Anconia, Atlas Shrugged
"To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That's what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul - would you understand why that's much harder?" - Howard Roark, The Fountainhead
"Instead of finding it crude, she found it strangely attractive- as if, she thought suddenly, as if sensuality were not physical at all, but came from a fine discrimination of the spirit" - Atlas Shrugged
"Love is reverence, and worship, and glory, and the upward glance." - Gail Wynand, The Fountainhead
"Man cannot expect the unearned, either in love or in money"
"What would it mean to have love above self interest? It would mean for instance that a husband would tell his wife, if he were moral according to the convential morality, that I am marrying you just for your own sake, I have no personal interest in it, but I am so unselfish that I am marrying you only for your own good."
"Men have not found words for it nor the deed nor the thought, but they have found the music. Let me see that in one single act of man on earth. Let me see it made real. Let me see the answer to the promise of that music. Not servants nor those served; not alters and immolations; but the final, the fulfilled, innocent of pain. Don't help me or serve me, but let me see it once, because I need it. Don't work for my happiness, my brothers-- show me yours-- show me that it is possible-- show me your achievement-- and the knowledge will give me courage for mine." - The Fountainhead
"But they had really forgotten the world, thought Mallory. This was a new earth, their own. The hills rose to the sky around them, as a wall of protection. And they had another protection-- the architect who walked among them ... the man who had made this possible -- the thought in the mind of that man -- and not the content of that thought, nor the result, not the vision that had created Monadnock Valley, nor the will that had made it real -- but the method of his thought, the rule of its function -- the method and rule which were not like those of the world beyond the hills. That stood on guard over the valley and over the crusaders within it." - The Fountainhead
"He wondered how one went about forcing one's mind into blankness, particular after a lifetime lived on the axiom that the constant, clearest, most ruthless function of his rational faculty was his foremost duty" - Atlas Shrugged
"Judge, and be prepared to be judged." - The Virtue of Selfishness
"I am, therefore I'll think." - Atlas Shrugged
"The men who are not interested in philosophy need it most urgently; they are most helplessly in its power." - Philosophy: Who Needs It?
"It is not a question of whether man chooses to be guided by a comprehensive view: he is not equipped to survive without it. The nature of his consciousness does not permit him an animal's percept-guided, range-of-the-moment form of existence. No matter how primitive his actions, he needs to project them into the future and to weigh their consequences; this requires a conceptual process, and a conceptual process cannot take place in a vacuum: it requires a context. Man's choice is not whether he needs a comprehensive view of life, but only whether his view is true or false. If it is false, it leads him to act as his own destroyer."
"Men have been taught that the ego is the synonym of evil, and selflessness the ideal of virtue. But the creator is the egotist in the absolute sense, and the selfless man is the one who does not think, feel, judge, or act. These are the functions of the self.
"Here the basic reversal is most deadly. The issue has been perverted and man has been left no alternative - and no freedom. As poles of good and evil, he was offered two conceptions: egotism and altruism. Egotism was held to mean the sacrifice of others to self. Altruism - the sacrifice of self to others. This tied man irrevocably to other men and left him nothing but a choice of pain; his own pain borne for the sake of others or pain inflicted upon others for the sake of self. When it was added that man must find joy in self-immolation, the trap was closed. Man was forced to accept masochism as his ideal - under the threat that sadism was his only alternative. This was the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on mankind.
"This was the device by which dependence and suffering were perpetuated as fundamentals of life.
"The choice is not self-sacrifice or domination. The choice is independence or dependence. The code of the creator or the code of the second-hander. This is the basic issue. It rests upon the alternative of life or death."
"...
I agreed to design Cortlandt for the purpose of seeing it erected as I designed it and for no other reason. That was the price I set for my work. I was not paid.
I do not blame Peter Keating. He was helpless. He had a contract with his employers. It was ignored. He had a promise that the structure he offered would be built as design. The promise was broken. The love of a man for the integrity of his work and his right to preserve it are now considered a vague intangible and an unessential. You have heard the prosecutor say that. Why was the building disfigured? For no reason. Such acts never have any reason, unless it's the vanity of some second-handers who feel they have a right to anyone's property, spiritual or material. Who permitted them to do it? No particular man among the dozens in authority. No one cared to permit it or to stop it. No one was responsible. No one can be held to account. Such is the nature of all collective action.
I did not receive the payment I asked. But the owners of Cortlandt got what they needed from me. They wanted a scheme devised to build a structure as cheaply as possible. They found no one else who could do it to their satisfaction. I could and did. They took the benefit of my work and made me contribute it as a gift. But I am not an altruist. I do not contribute gifts of this nature.
It is said that I have destroyed the home of the destitute. It is forgotten that but for me the destitute could not have had this particular home. Those who were concerned with the poor had to come to me, who have never been concerned, in order to help the poor. It is believed that the poverty of the future tenants gave them a right to my work. That their need constituted a claim on my life. That it was my duty to contribute anything demanded of me. This is the second-hander's credo now swallowing the world.
I came here to say that 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.
I wished to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others.
It had to be said. The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.
I wished to come here and say that the integrity of a man's creative work is of greater importance than any charitable endeavor. Those of you who do not understand this are the men who're destroying the world.
I wished to come here and state my terms. I do not care to exist on any others.
I recognize no obligations toward men except one: to respect their freedom and to take no part in a slave society. To my country, I wish to give ten years which I will spend in jail if my country exists no longer. I will spend them in memory and in gratitude for what my country has been. It will be my act of loyalty, my refusal to live or work in what has taken its place.
My act of loyalty to every creator who ever lived and was made to suffer by the force responsible for the Cortlandt I dynamited.
..."
- Howard Roark, The Fountainhead
"So you think that money is the root of all evil? Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?
When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears not all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor--your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money, Is this what you consider evil?
Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions--and you'll learn that man's mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.
But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made--before it can be looted or mooched--made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.'
To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss--the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery--that you must offer them values, not wounds--that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade--with reason, not force, as their final arbiter--it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability--and the degree of a man's productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?
But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the law of causality--the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind.
Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants: money will not give him a code of values, if he's evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he's evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money. Is this the reason why you call it evil?
Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth--the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one, would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?
Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men's vices or men's stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment's or a penny's worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you'll scream that money is evil. Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the root of your hatred of money?
Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money?
Or did you say it's the love of money that's the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money--and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.
Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.
Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another--their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.
But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich--will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt--and of his life, as he deserves.
Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard--the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money--the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law--men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims--then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.
Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion--when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing--when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors--when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you--when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice--you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that is does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.
Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked, 'Account overdrawn.'
When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, 'Who is destroying the world? You are.
You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization and you wonder why it's crumbling around you, while you're damning its life-blood--money. You look upon money as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men's history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, whose names changed, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase about the evil of money, which you mouth with such righteous recklessness, comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves--slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody's mind and left unimproved for centuries. So long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer, Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers--as industrialists.
To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money--and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man's mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being--the self-made man--the American industrialist.
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.
Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters' continents. Now the looters' credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide-- as, I think, he will.
Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. 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."
- Francisco d' Anconia, Atlas Shrugged
"No, I do not want my attitude to be misunderstood. I shall be glad to state it for the record. I am in full agreement with the facts of everything said about me in the newspapers - with the facts, but not with the evaluation. I work for nothing by my own profit - which I make by selling a product they need to men who are willing and able to buy it. I do not produce it for their benefit at the expense of mine, and they do not buy it for my benefit at the expense of theirs; I do not sacrifice my interests to them nor do they sacrifice theirs to me; we deal as equals by mutual consent to mutual advantage - and I am proud of every penny that I have earned in this manner. I am rich and I am proud of every penny I own. I made my money by my own effort, in free exchange and through voluntary consent of every man I dealt with - the voluntary consent of those who employed me when I started, the voluntary consent of those who work for me now, the voluntary consent of those who buy my product. I shall answer all the questions you are afraid to ask me openly. Do I wish to pay my workers more than their services are worth to me? I do not. Do I wish to sell my product for less than my customers are willing to pay me? I do not. Do I wish to sell it at a loss or give it away? I do not. If this is evil, do whatever you please about me, according to whatever standards you hold. These are mine. I am earning my own living, as every honest man must. 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 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. I could say to you that I have done more good for my fellow men than you can ever hope to accomplish - but I will not say it, because I do not seek the good of others as a sanction for my right to exist, nor do I recognize the good of others as justification for their seizure of my property or their destruction of my life. I will not say that the good of others was the purpose of my work - my own good was my purpose, and I despise the man who surrenders his. I could say to you that you do nor serve the public good - that nobody's good can be achieved at the price of human sacrifices - that when you violate the rights of one man, you have violated the rights of all, and a public of rightless creatures is doomed to destruction. I could say to you that you will and can achieve nothing but universal devastation - as any looter must, when he runs out of victims. I could say it but I won't. It is not your particular policy that I challenge, but your moral premise. If it were true that men could achieve their good my means of turning some men into sacrificial animals, and I were asked to immolate myself of 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 mood requires victims, then I say: The public good be damned, I will have no part of it!"
- Hank Rearden, Atlas Shrugged
"They proclaim that every man born is entitled to exist without labor and, the laws of reality to the contrary notwithstanding, is entitled to receive his 'minimum sustenance' - his food, his clothes, his shelter[, his healthcare] - with no effort on his part, as his due and his birthright. To receive it - from whom? Blank-out. Every man, they announce, owns an equal share of the technological benefits created in the world. Created - by whom? Blank-out. Frantic cowards who posture as defenders of industrialists now define the purpose of economics as 'an adjustment between the unlimited desires of men and the goods supplied in limited quantity.' Supplied - by whom? Blank-out. Intellectual hoodlums who pose as professors, shrug away the thinkers of the past by declaring that their social theories were based on the impractical assumption that man was a rational being - but since men are not rational, they declare, there ought to be established a system that will make it possible for them to exist while being irrational, which means: while defying reality. Who will make it possible? Blank-out. Any stray mediocrity rushes into print with plans to control the production of mankind - and whoever agrees or disagrees with his statistics, no one questions his right to enforce his plans by means of a gun. Enforce - on whom? Blank-out. Random females with causeless incomes flitter on trips around the globe and return to deliver the message that the backward peoples of the world demand a higher standard of living. Demand - of whom? Blank-out.
--
Stand on an empty stretch of soil in a wilderness unexplored by man and ask yourself what manner of survival you would achieve and how long you would last if you refused to think, with no one around to teach you the motions, or, if you chose to think, how much your mind would be able to discover - ask yourself how many independent conclusions you have reached in the course of your life and how much of your time was spent performing the actions you learned from others - ask yourself whether you would be able to discover how to till the sod and grow your food, whether you would be able to invent a wheel, a lever, an induction coil, a generator, an electronic tube - then decide whether men of ability are exploiters who live by the fruit of your labor and rob you of the wealth you produce, and whether you dare to believe that you possess the power to enslave them. Let your women take a look at the jungle female with her shriveled face and pendulous breasts, as she sits grinding meal in a bowl, hour after hour, century by century - then let them ask themselves whether their 'instinct of tool-making' will provide them with their electric refrigerators, their washing machines and vacuum cleaners, and if not, whether they care to destroy those who provided it all, but not 'by instinct'.
--
Learn to distinguish the difference between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality. An error of knowledge is not a moral flaw, provided you are willing to correct it; only a mystic would judge human beings by the standard of an impossible, automatic omniscience. But a breach of morality is the conscious choice of an action you know to be evil, or a willful evasion of knowledge, a suspension of sight and of thought. That which you do not know, is not a moral charge against you; but that which you refuse to know, is an account of infamy growing in your soul. Make every allowance for errors of knowledge; do not forgive or accept any break of morality. Give the benefit of the doubt to those who seek to know; but treat as potential killers those specimens of insolent depravity who make demands upon you, announcing that they have and seek no reasons, proclaiming, as a license, that they 'just feel it' - or those who reject an irrefutable argument by saying: 'It's only logic,' which mean: 'It's only reality.' The only realm opposed to reality is the realm and premise of death.
Accept the fact that the achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness - not pain or mindless self-indulgence - is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values. Happiness was the responsibility you dreaded, it required the kind of rational discipline you did not value yourself enough to assume - and the anxious staleness of your days is the monument to your evasion of the knowledge that there is no moral substitute for happiness, that there is no more despicable coward than the man who deserted the battle for his joy, fearing to assert his right to existence, lacking the courage and the loyalty to life of a bird or a flower reaching for the sun. Discard the protective rags of that vice which you called a virtue: humility - learn to value yourself, which means to fight for your happiness - and when you learn that pride is the sum of all virtues, you will learn to live like a man.
As a basic step of self-esteem, learn to treat as the mark of a cannibal any man's demand for your help. To demand it is to claim that your life is his property - and loathsome as such claim might be, there's something still more loathsome: your agreement. Do you ask if it's ever proper to help another man? No - if he claims it as his right or as a moral duty that you owe him. Yes - if such is your own desire based on your own selfish pleasure in the value of his person and his struggle. Suffering as such is not a value; only man's fight against suffering, is. If you choose to help a man who suffers, do it only on the ground of his virtues, of his fight to recover, of his rational record, or of the fact that he suffers unjustly; then your action is still a trade, and his virtue is the payment for your help. But to help a man who has no virtues, to help him on the ground of his suffering as such, to accept his faults, his need, as a claim - is to accept the mortgage of a zero on your values. A man who has no virtues is a hater of existence who acts on the premise of death; to help him is to sanction his evil and to support his career of destruction. Be it only a penny you will not miss or a kindly smile he has not earned, a tribute to a zero is treason to life and to all those who struggle to maintain it. It is of such pennies and smiles that the desolation of your world was made.
Do not say that my morality too hard for you to practice and that you fear it as your fear the unknown. Whatever living moments you have known, were lived by the values of my code. But you stifled, negated, betrayed it. You kept sacrificing your virtues to your vices, and the best among men to the worst. Look around you: what you have done to society, you have done it first within your soul; one is the image of the other. This dismal wreckage, which is now your world, is the physical form of the treason you committed to your values, to your friends, to you defenders, to your future, to your country, to yourself.
--
The doctrine that 'human rights' are superior to 'property rights' simply means that some human beings have the right to make property out of others; it means the right of the incompetent to own their betters and to use them as productive cattle. Whoever regards this as human and right, has no right to the title of 'human'.
--
You cannot obtain the products of a mind except on the owner's terms, by trade and by volitional consent. Any other policy of men toward man's property is the policy of criminals, no matter what their numbers. Criminals are savages who play it short-range and starve when their prey runs out ... you believed that crime could be 'practical' if your government decreed that robbery was legal and resistance to robbery illegal.
--
The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man's self-defense, and, as such, may resort to force only against those who start the use of force. The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law.
--
I am speaking to those among you who have retained some sovereign shred of their soul, unsold and unstamped: '- to the order of others.' If there is an honest, rational desire in you to learn what is wrong with the world, you are the man whom I wished to address. By the rules and terms of my code, one owes a rational statement to those whom it does concern and who're making an effort to know. Those who're making an effort to fail to understand me, are not a concern of mine.
I am speaking to those who desire to live and to recapture the honor of their soul. Now that you know the truth about your world, stop supporting your own destroyers. The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it. Withdraw your sanction. Withdraw your support. Do not try to live on your enemies' terms or to win at a game where they're setting the rules. Do not seek the favor of those who enslaved you, do not beg for alms from those who have robbed you, be it subsidies, loans, or jobs, do not join their team to recoup what they've taken by helping them rob your neighbors. One cannot hope to maintain one's life by accepting bribes to condone one's destruction.
Since you're captive, act as a captive, do not help them pretend that you're free. Be the silent, incorruptible enemy they dread. When they force you, obey - but do not volunteer. Never volunteer a step in their direction, or a wish, or a plea, or a purpose. Do not help a holdup man to claim that he acts as your friend and benefactor. Do not help your jailers to pretend that their jail is your natural state of existence. Do not help them to fake reality. That fake is the only dam holding off their secret terror, the terror of knowing they're unfit to exist; remove it and let them drown; your sanction is their only life belt.
The political system we will build is contained in a single moral premise: no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force. Every man will stand or fall, live or die by his rational judgment. If he fails to use it and falls, he will be his only victim. If he fears that his judgment is inadequate, he will not be given a gun to improve it. If he chooses to correct his errors, he will have the unobstructed example of his betters, for guidance in learning to think; but an end will be put to the infamy of paying with one life for the errors of another.
In that world, you'll be able to rise in the morning with the spirit you have known in your childhood: that spirit of eagerness, adventure and certainty which comes from dealing with a rational universe. No child is afraid of nature; it is your fear of men that will vanish, the fear that has stunted your soul, the fear you acquired in your early encounters with the incomprehensible, the unpredictable, the contradictory, the arbitrary, the hidden, the faked, the irrational in men. You will live in a world of responsible beings, who will be as consistent and reliable as facts; the guarantee of their character will be a system of existence where objective reality is the standard and the judge. Your virtues will be given protection, you vices and weaknesses will not. Every chance will be open to your good, none will be provided of your evil. What you'll receive from men will not be alms, or pity, or mercy, or forgiveness of sins, but a single value: justice. And when you'll look at men or at yourself, you will feel, not disgust, suspicion and guilt, but a single constant: respect.
Such is the future you are capable of winning. It requires struggle; so does any human value. All life is a purposeful struggle, and your only choice is the choice of a goal. Do you wish to continue the battle of your present or do you wish to fight for my world? Do you wish to continue a struggle that consists of clinging to precarious ledges in a sliding descent to the abyss, a struggle where the hardships you endure are irreversible and the victories you win bring you closer to destruction? Or do you wish to undertake a struggle that consists of rising from ledge to ledge in a steady ascent to the top, a struggle where the hardships are investments in your future, and victories bring you irreversibly closer to the world of your moral ideal, and should you die without reaching full sunlight, you will die on a level touched by its rays? Such is the choice before you. Let your mind and your love of existence decide.
The last of my words will be addressed to those heroes who might still be hidden in the world, those who are held prisoner, not by their evasions, but their virtues and their desperate courage. My brothers in spirit, check in your virtues and on the nature of the enemies you're serving. Your destroyers hold you by means of your endurance, your generosity, your innocence, your love - the endurance that carries their burdens - the generosity that responds to their evil and gives them the benefit of every doubt, refusing to condemn them without understanding and incapable of understating such motives as theirs - the love, your love of life, which makes you believe that they are men and that they love it, too. But the world of today is the world they wanted; life is the object of their hatred. Leave them to the death they worship. In the name of your magnificent devotion to this earth, leave them, don't exhaust the greatness of your soul on achieving the triumph of the evil of theirs. Do you hear me ... my love?
In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that reveals unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it's yours.
But to win it requires your total dedication and a total break with the world of your past, with the doctrine that man is a sacrificial animal who exists for the pleasure of others. Fight for the values of your person. Fight for the virtue of your pride. Fight for the essence of that which is man: for his sovereign rational mind. Fight with the radiant certainty and the absolute rectitude of knowing that yours is the Morality of Life and that yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth.
You will win when you are ready to pronounce the oath I have taken at the start of my battle:
"I swear - by my life and my love of it - that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."
"Paranormal phenomena have a habit of going away whenever they are tested under rigorous conditions. This is why the $1,000,000 reward of James Randi, offered to anyone who can demonstrate a paranormal effect under proper scientific controls, is safe." - Richard Dawkins
"To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today." -Isaac Asimov
"The characteristic that distinguishes holy wars from normal technical disputes is that in a holy war most of the participants spend their time trying to pass off personal value choices and cultural attachments as objective technical evaluations." - from 'The Jargon File'
"If voodoo could predict how variations in doll manufacture affected performance of the curse; if a Fundamental Theorem Of Voodoo could determine the shape of the "needle penetration of doll versus distress of victim" plot, then voodoo would be as much a science as quantum mechanics. The important difference between magic and science is not that one deals in chants, incantations and crystal balls and the other deals in equations, computer code and electron microscopes. The difference is that one works and the other does not." - John K Clark, on the SL4 mailing list.
"Nearly all peoples have developed their own creation myth, and the Genesis story is just one that happened to have been adopted by one particular tribe of Middle Eastern herders. It has no more special status than the belief of a particular West African tribe that the world was created from the excrement of ants." - Richard Dawkins, 'The Blind Watchmaker'
"Listening to a theist go on about the inner workings of their fictional, cultist belief systems is like listening to a Trekkie talk about how the engines on the USS Enterprise are put together." - IanIronMang
"One man's theology is another man's belly laugh" - Robert A. Heinlein
"If I handed you a list of every God, spirit, supernatural being, religion, supernatural claim, etc to have ever been proposed by humanity, and gave you the task of writing "legitimate" or "we made this shit up" next to each one, how far down the list would you get before spotting a trend?" - Unknown
"A 'supernatural' explanation appeals to ontologically basic mental things, mental entities that cannot be reduced to nonmental entities" - Richard Carrier, also see http://lesswrong.com/lw/tv/excluding_the_supernatural
"The 'unreal' is merely that negation of existence which is the content of a human consciousness when it attempts to abandon reason." - Ayn Rand
"Magic is just a way of saying 'I don't know.'" - Terry Pratchett, "Nation"
"Man's unfailing capacity to believe what he prefers to be true rather than what the evidence shows to be likely and possible has always astounded me. We long for a caring Universe which will save us from our childish mistakes, and in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary we will pin all our hopes on the slimmest of doubts." - Academician Prokhor Zakharov (from Sid Meier's 'Alpha Centauri')
"It would be like the Pope attacking Islam on the basis that faith is not an adequate justification for asserting the existence of their deity." - Eliezer Yudkowsky
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction." - Blaise Pascal
"CAESAR (recovering his self-possession): Pardon him. Theodotus, he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature." - George Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra (1898)
"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful." - Lucius Annaeus Seneca
"Religion is the distilled essence of ignorance and closed-mindedness. It is in effect an addictive drug that clouds the mind and renders it immune to reason and easily manipulated by authority. It is a viral delusion that grows until it leads to personal and social madness." - Michael Wilson
"I was contacted by some random dude on facebook who tried to convince me to become religious. All he had to offer was fear, guilt and collectivism... and he desperately tried to use REASON to convince me to give up reason. Needless to say, he failed miserably." - Jesper Foglemark, objectivismonline.net
"I am against religion because it forces us to be satisfied with not understanding the world." - Richard Dawkins
"The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind." - H.L. Mencken
"Government is for slaves; Free men govern themselves." - Albert Parsons
"A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined, but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government." - George Washington
"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
"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship." - Alexander Tyler
"Democracy is the worship of jackals by jackasses." - H.L. Mencken
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote." - Benjamin Franklin
"There are two methods, or means, and only two, whereby man's needs and desires can be satisfied. One is the production and exchange of wealth; this is the economic means. The other is the theft of wealth produced by others; this is the political means." - Albert Jay Nock
"We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others, the same word many mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name - liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names - liberty and tyranny." - Abraham Lincoln
"A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor and bread it has earned - this is the sum of good government." - Thomas Jefferson
"Property is the fruit of labor; property is desirable; it is a positive good in the world. Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently and build one for him self" - Abraham Lincoln
"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have" - Thomas Jefferson
"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them." - Thomas Jefferson
"If people let the government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls who live under tyranny" - Thomas Jefferson
"Government doesn't fix problems, it subsidizes them." - Ronald Reagan
"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
"I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!" - Barry Goldwater
"Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace-- but there is no peace. The war is actually begun. The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms. Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!" - Patrick Henry
"Peace is not the absence of conflict. Peace is having the ability to defend yourself."
"The best defense is a good offense."
- many
"I come in peace. I didn't bring artillery. But I'm pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you fuck with me, I'll kill you all." - Marine General James Mattis
"Dear Frederick, thank you for your nice letter, but I am actually a US Marine who was born to kill, whereas clearly you seem to have mistaken me for some sort of wine sipping, communist dick suck. And although peace probably appeals to tree hugging bisexuals like you and your parents, I happen to be a death-dealing, blood-crazed warrior who wakes up every day just hoping for the chance to dismember my enemies and defile their civilizations." - Unknown
"Times hadn't changed much after all. Men were still men. They knew what justice was, courts and lawyers to the contrary." - Clear and Present Danger by Tom Clancy
"We are asking- no, telling- the Israelis that they must dance with Palestinians and the Arab world. Let's be more succint. We are telling these Jews, that have contributed so much to society and have elevated our culture to heights unknown with their contributions to art, philosophy, medicine, all the sciences and virtually every endeavor known to man, that they must sit down with the very barbarians that threaten to annihilate them in the name of God." - Sigmund, Carl and Alfred
"The first condition for the establishment of perpetual peace is the general adoption of the principles of laissez-faire capitalism." - Ludwig Von Mises
"The object of Gerson's scorn is misplaced. Gerson does not ask, "How many enterprises and jobs might have been created, how many people might have been saved from illness and disease, how many more poor children might have been fed but for the additional costs, market dislocations, and management inefficiencies that distort supply and demand or discourage research and development as a result of the federal government's role?" - Mark Levin
"One of the worst fallacies in the field of economics - propagated by Karl Marx and accepted by almost everyone today, including many businessmen - is the notion that the development of unjust monopolies is an inescapable and intrinsic result of the operation of a free, unregulated economy. In fact, the exact opposite is true. It is a free market that makes unjust monopolies impossible." - Nathanial Branden
"People do not cooperate under the division of labor because they love or should love one another. They cooperate because this best serves their own interests. Neither love nor charity nor any other sympathetic sentiments but rightly understood selfishness is what originally impelled man to adjust himself to the requirements of society, to respect the rights and freedoms of his fellow men and to substitute peaceful collaboration for enmity and conflict." - Ludwig von Mises
"Capitalism knows only one color: that color is green; all else is necessarily subservient to it, hence, race, gender and ethnicity cannot be considered within it." - Thomas Sowell
"What pays under capitalism is satisfying the common man, the customer. The more people you satisfy, the better for you." - Ludwig von Mises
"In the civil society, the individual is recognized and accepted as more than an abstract statistic or faceless member of some group; rather, he is a unique, spiritual being with a soul and a conscience." - Mark Levin
"What they have to discover, what all the efforts of capitalism's enemies are frantically aimed at hiding, is the fact that capitalism is not merely the 'practical,' but the only moral system in history." - Ayn Rand
"Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive ... Does the fault lie in men's hypocrisy or in the nature of the principle? The most dreadful butchers were the most sincere. They believed in the perfect society reached through the guillotine and the firing squad. Nobody questioned their right to murder since they were murdering for an altruistic purpose. It was accepted that man must be sacrificed for other men. Actors change, but the course of the tragedy remains the same. A humanitarian who starts with declarations of love for mankind and ends with a sea of blood." - Ayn Rand
"I can say - not as a patriotic bromide, but with full knowledge of the necessary metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, political and esthetic roots - that the United States of America is the greatest, the noblest and, in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world." - Ayn Rand
"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 knowing how it happened." - Norman Thomas, 1940's Socialist Party president
"We can't expect the American People to jump from Capitalism to Communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving them small doses of Socialism, until they awaken one day to find that they have Communism." - Nikita Khrushchev
"Fear of Anthropogenic (Man-Made) Global Warming provides a way to engage everyone in the movement. Socialists of all stripes no longer have to spew Marxist notions that turn most people off; now, they can talk the "science" of global warming and hurricanes and massive floods and such, and, using fear, trample the average guy into their socialist goals of stifling capitalism, growth, and having the government take over the economy through this environmental back-door." - A Layman's Guide to Anthropogenic (Man-Made) Global Warming
"No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits ... Climate change provides the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world." - Christine Stewart, Canadian Environment Minister
"It makes no difference whether government controls allegedly favor the interests of labor or business [or the environment], of the poor or the rich, of a special class or a special race: the results are the same. The notion that a dictatorship can benefit any one group at the expense of others is a worn remnant of the Marxist mythology of class warfare, refuted by half a century of factual evidence. All men are victims and losers under a dictatorship; nobody wins-except the ruling clique." - Ayn Rand
"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
"When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how holy the motives." - Robert A Heinlein
"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 men free from men." - Ayn Rand
"Political tags -- such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth -- are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire." - Robert A Heinlein
"You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or a right. There is only an up or down: up to man's age-old dream -- the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order -- or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. And regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course." - Ronald Reagan, Republican National Convention, 1964
"UPS and FedEx are doing just fine. It's the Post Office that's always having problems." (oops!)
"My plan will spread the wealth around." - Barack Obama
"Poverty and suffering are not due to unequal distribution of goods and resources, but to the unequal distribution of capitalism" - Rush Limbaugh
"If ever a time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin." - Samuel Adams, 1776
"When I say capitalism, I mean a full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez faire capitalism, with a separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church." - Ayn Rand
Jill: 'I don't pay attention to politics.'
Ben: 'You should. It's barely less important than your own heart beat.'
- Robert Heinlein (SISL)
"Apathy on the individual level becomes insanity on the mass level" - Douglas Hofstadter
Liberalism is a mental disorder.
Based on strikingly irrational beliefs and emotions, modern liberals relentlessly undermine the most important principles on which our freedoms were founded," says Dr. Lyle Rossiter, author of the new book, "The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness."
"Like spoiled, angry children, they rebel against the normal responsibilities of adulthood and demand that a parental government meet their needs from cradle to grave."
While political activists on the other side of the spectrum have made similar observations, Rossiter boasts professional credentials and a life virtually free of activism and links to "the vast right-wing conspiracy."
For more than 35 years he has diagnosed and treated more than 1,500 patients as a board-certified clinical psychiatrist and examined more than 2,700 civil and criminal cases as a board-certified forensic psychiatrist.
He received his medical and psychiatric training at the University of Chicago. Rossiter says the kind of liberalism being displayed by the two major candidates for the Democratic Party presidential nomination can only be understood as a psychological disorder.
"A social scientist who understands human nature will not dismiss the vital roles of free choice, voluntary cooperation and moral integrity -as liberals do," he says.
"A political leader who understands human nature will not ignore individual differences in talent, drive, personal appeal and work ethic, and then try to impose economic and social equality on the population - as liberals do. And a legislator who understands human nature will not create an environment of rules which over-regulates and over-taxes the nation's citizens, corrupts their character and reduces them to wards of the state - as liberals do."
Dr. Rossiter says the liberal agenda preys on weakness and feelings of inferiority in the population by:
a.. creating and reinforcing perceptions of victimization;
b.. satisfying infantile claims to entitlement, indulgence and compensation;
c.. augmenting primitive feelings of envy;
d.. rejecting the sovereignty of the individual, subordinating him to the will of the government.
"The roots of liberalism - and its associated madness - can be clearly identified by understanding how children develop from infancy to adulthood and how distorted development produces the irrational beliefs of the liberal mind," he says.
"When the modern liberal mind whines about imaginary victims, rages against imaginary villains and seeks above all else to run the lives of persons competent to run their own lives, the neurosis of the liberal mind becomes painfully obvious."
OBJECTIVE JUSTICE VS. LEGAL MONOPOLISM
"I defend anarchism, or society without the State, because I believe that innocent people cannot be forced to surrender any of their natural rights. Those who wish to delegate some of their rights to a government are free to do so, provided they do not violate the rights of dissenters who choose not to endorse their government.
As Ayn Rand has said, the lives of other people are not yours to dispose of. Yet this is precisely what every government attempts to do. A government initiates physical force (or the threat of force) to prohibit other people from exercising their right to enforce the rules of justice. (Either every person has this executive power, or no one does, according to the principle of political reductionism.) A government, while engaging in certain activities which it claims are just, coercively prevents other people from engaging in those selfsame activities.
By what moral means, I ask, does a government come to possess this exclusive right? A government cannot bestow justice on an action that would be unjust if undertaken by someone else. Nor can a government, through force or arbitrary decree, render an action unjust when undertaken by someone else, if that same action is just when undertaken by government. The principles of justice are objective and therefore universal; they apply equally and without exception to every human being, as does every rational precept and procedure. A mathematical computation, for example, cannot be correct when computed by a government, and incorrect when computed by someone else. A deductive syllogism, if valid for those in government, is equally valid for those outside of government. Murder, if wrong when committed by an individual, is equally wrong when committed by a government.
Likewise, an activity, if moral when pursued by a government, is equally moral when pursued by someone else. All this should be obvious to those who agree with the principles put forth by Ayn Rand. If, therefore, the principles of justice are objective (i.e., knowable to human reason), then a government can no more claim a monopoly on the legitimate use of force than it can claim a monopoly on reason.
Those minarchists who claim that justice can prevail only under government must implicitly defend the view that justice is either subjective or intrinsic. If justice is subjective, if it varies from one person to the next, then government can be defended as necessary to establish objective rules. Likewise, if justice is intrinsic to government itself, if whatever a government decrees is necessarily just, then government is justified automatically.
If, however, justice is neither subjective nor intrinsic, but instead is objective - i.e., if it can be derived by rational methods from the facts of man's nature and the requirements of social existence - then the principles of justice are knowable to every rational person. This means that no person, group of persons, association, or institution whether known as "government," "State," or by any other name - can rightfully claim a legal monopoly in matters pertaining to justice.
Rational anarchism, in short, is simply the application of Ayn Rand's theory of objective knowledge to the realm of justice."
-
IN DEFENSE OF RATIONAL ANARCHISM by George H. Smith http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~thomas/po/rational-anarchism.html
"In the universe where everything works the way it common-sensically ought to, everything about the study of Artificial General Intelligence is driven by the one overwhelming fact of the indescribably huge effects: initial conditions and unfolding patterns whose consequences will resound for as long as causal chains continue out of Earth, until all the stars and galaxies in the night sky have burned down to cold iron, and maybe long afterward, or forever into infinity if the true laws of physics should happen to permit that. To deliberately thrust your mortal brain onto that stage, as it plays out on ancient Earth the first root of life, is an act so far beyond "audacity" as to set the word on fire, an act which can only be excused by the terrifying knowledge that the empty skies offer no higher authority." - Eliezer Yudkowsky
"... This is the subject matter of Fun Theory, which ultimately determines the Fate of the Universe. For if all goes well, the question "What is fun?" shall determine the shape and pattern of a billion galaxies." - Eliezer Yudkowsky
"Sorry Arthur, but I'd guess that there is an implicit rule about announcement of an AI-driven singularity: the announcement must come from the AI, not the programmer. I personally would expect the announcement in some unmistakable form such as a message in letters of fire written on the face of the moon." - Dan Clemmensen
"There are lots of people who think that if they can just get enough of something, a mind will magically emerge. Facts, simulated neurons, GA trials, proposition evaluations/second, raw CPU power, whatever. It's an impressively idiotic combination of mental laziness and wishful thinking." - Michael Wilson
" ‘It just so happens that your friend here is only mostly dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead.’ - The Princess Bride" - Eliezer Yudkowsky on Cryonics
"Ethically, what is the correct thing to do when medicine encounters a difficult problem? Stabilize the patient until a solution can be found? Or throw people away like garbage? Centuries from now, historians may marvel at the shortsightedness and rationalizations used to sanction the unnecessary death of millions." - Brian G. Wowk Ph.D, 9th May 2006 (on the subject of Cryonics)
"He knew well that fate and chance never come to the aid of those who replace action with pleas and laments. He who walks conquers the road. Let his legs grow tired and weak on the way - he must crawl on his hands and knees, and then surely, he will see in the night a distant light of hot campfires, and upon approaching, will see a merchants' caravan; and this caravan will surely happen to be going the right way, and there will be a free camel, upon which the traveler will reach his destination. Meanwhile, he who sits on the road and wallows in despair - no matter how much he cries and complains - will evoke no compassion in the soulless rocks. He will die in the desert, his corpse will become meat for foul hyenas, his bones will be buried in hot sand. How many people died prematurely, and only because they didn't love life strongly enough! Hodja Nasreddin considered such a death humiliating for a human being.
'No' - said he to himself and, gritting his teeth, repeated wrathfully: 'No! I won't die today! I don't want to die!'"
- "The tale of Hodja Nasreddin" by Leonid Solovyov, translated by Tiiba2
In Persia many centuries ago, the Sufi mullah or holy man Nasruddin was arrested after preaching in the great square in front of the Shah's palace. The local clerics had objected to Mullah Nasruddin's unorthodox teachings, and had demanded his arrest and execution as a heretic. Dragged by palace guards to the Shah's throne room, he was sentenced immediately to death.
As he was being taken away, however, Nasruddin cried out to the Shah: "O great Shah, if you spare me, I promise that within a year I will teach your favourite horse to sing!"
The Shah knew that Sufis often told the most outrageous fables, which sounded blasphemous to many Muslims but which were nevertheless intended as lessons to those who would learn. Thus he had been tempted to be merciful, anyway, despite the demands of his own religious advisors. Now, admiring the audacity of the old man, and being a gambler at heart, he accepted his proposal.
The next morning, Nasruddin was in the royal stable, singing hymns to the Shah's horse, a magnificent white stallion. The animal, however, was more interested in his oats and hay, and ignored him. The grooms and stablehands all shook their heads and laughed at him. "You old fool", said one. "What have you accomplished by promising to teach the Shah's horse to sing? You are bound to fail, and when you do, the Shah will not only have you killed - you'll be tortured as well, for mocking him!"
Nasruddin turned to the groom and replied: "On the contrary, I have indeed accomplished much. Remember, I have been granted another year of life, which is precious in itself. Furthermore, in that time, many things can happen. I might escape. Or I might die anyway. Or the Shah might die, and his successor will likely release all prisoners to celebrate his accession to the throne".
"Or...". Suddenly, Nasruddin smiled. "Or, perhaps, the horse will learn to sing".
- Unknown
"I stopped once to watch the sights. It was the worst fucking mistake I ever made." - Animalpak.com
"Living crazy is the only way." - Tech N9ne, Einstein
"Get rid of all the meaningless crap in your life and your training. Stop all the things that make you a pussy and steal your energy. Get your life back." - Jim Wendler
"Ignore the ramblings of the ignorant, and step on or over their crumpled bodies as you make your way to the top of the mountain. Eat upon their flesh for fuel and through your determination and will, banish them to obscurity and a life of complacency and self-righteousness that is the hell in which they live." - Richard Safreed
"No citizen has a right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training... what a disgrace it is for a man to grow old without ever seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable." - Socrates
"I believe that the definition of definition is reinvention. To not be like your parents. To not be like your friends. To be yourself. Completely. When I was young I had no sense of myself. All I was, was a product of all the fear and humiliation I suffered. Fear of my parents. The humiliation of teachers calling me "garbage can" and telling me I'd be mowing lawns for a living. And the very real terror of my fellow students. I was threatened and beaten up for the color of my skin and my size. I was skinny and clumsy, and when others would tease me I didn't run home crying, wondering why. I knew all too well.
I was there to be antagonized. In sports I was laughed at. A spaz. I was pretty good at boxing but only because the rage that filled my every waking moment made me wild and unpredictable. I fought with some strange fury. The other boys thought I was crazy. I hated myself all the time. As stupid at it seems now, I wanted to talk like them, dress like them, carry myself with the ease of knowing that I wasn't going to get pounded in the hallway between classes. Years passed and I learned to keep it all inside.
I only talked to a few boys in my grade. Other losers. Some of them are to this day the greatest people I have ever known. Hang out with a guy who has had his head flushed down a toilet a few times, treat him with respect, and you'll find a faithful friend forever. But even with friends, school sucked. Teachers gave me hard time. I didn't think much of them either.
Then came Mr. Pepperman, my advisor. He was a powerfully built Vietnam veteran, and he was scary. No one ever talked out of turn in his class. Once one kid did and Mr. P. lifted him off the ground and pinned him to the blackboard. Mr. P. could see that I was in bad shape, and one Friday in October he asked me if I had ever worked out with weights. I told him no. He told me that I was going to take some of the money that I had saved and buy a hundred-pound set of weights at Sears. As I left his office, I started to think of things I would say to him on Monday when he asked about the weights that I was not going to buy. Still, it made me feel special. My father never really got that close to caring.
On Saturday I bought the weights, but I couldn't even drag them to my mom's car. An attendant laughed at me as he put them on a dolly. Monday came and I was called into Mr. P.'s office after school. He said that he was going to show me how to work out. He was going to put me on a program and start hitting me in the solar plexus in the hallway when I wasn't looking. When I could take the punch we wouldknow that we were getting somewhere.
At no time was I to look at myself in the mirror or tell anyone at school what I was doing. In the gym he showed me ten basic exercises. I paid more attention than I ever did in any of my classes. I didn't want to blow it. I went home that night and started right in. Weeks passed, and every once in a while Mr. P. would give me a shot and drop me in the hallway, sending my books flying. The other students didn't know what to think. More weeks passed, and I was steadily adding new weights to the bar. I could sense the power inside my body growing. I could feel it.
Right before Christmas break I was walking to class, and from out of nowhere Mr. Pepperman appeared and gave me a shot in the chest. I laughed and kept going. He said I could look at myself now. I got home and ran to the bathroom and pulled off my shirt. I saw a body, not just the shell that housed my stomach and my heart. My biceps bulged. My chest had definition. I felt strong. It was the first time I can remember having a sense of myself. I had done something and no one could ever take it away.
You couldn't say shit to me. It took me years to fully appreciate the value of the lessons I have learned from the Iron. I used to think that it was my adversary, that I was trying to lift that which does not want to be lifted. I was wrong. When the Iron doesn't want to come off the mat, it's the kindest thing it can do for you. If it flew up and went through the ceiling, it wouldn't teach you anything. That's the way the Iron talks to you. It tells you that the material you work with is that which you will come to resemble.
That which you work against will always work against you. It wasn't until my late twenties that I learned that by working out I had given myself a great gift. I learned that nothing good comes without work and a certain amount of pain. When I finish a set that leaves me shaking, I know more about myself. When something gets bad, I know it can't be as bad as that workout. I used to fight the pain, but recently this became clear to me: pain is not my enemy; it is my call to greatness. But when dealing with the Iron, one must be careful to interpret the pain correctly. Most injuries involving the Iron come from ego.
I once spent a few weeks lifting weight that my body wasn't ready for and spent a few months not picking up anything heavier than a fork. Try to lift what you're not prepared to and the Iron will teach you a little lesson in restraint and self-control. I have never met a truly strong person who didn't have self-respect. I think a lot of inwardly and outwardly directed contempt passes itself off as self- respect: the idea of raising yourself by stepping on someone's shoulders instead of doing it yourself. When I see guys working out for cosmetic reasons, I see vanity exposing them in the worst way, as cartoon characters, billboards for imbalance and insecurity. Strength reveals itself through character. It is the difference between bouncers who get off strong-arming people and Mr.Pepperman.
Muscle mass does not always equal strength. Strength is kindness and sensitivity. Strength is understanding that your power is both physical and emotional. That it comes from the body and the mind. And the heart. Yukio Mishima said that he could not entertain the idea of romance if he was not strong. Romance is such a strong and overwhelming passion, a weakened body cannot sustain it for long. I have some of my most romantic thoughts when I am with the Iron.
Once I was in love with a woman. I thought about her the most when the pain from a workout was racing through my body. Everything in me wanted her. So much so that sex was only a fraction of my total desire. It was the single most intense love I have ever felt, but she lived far away and I didn't see her very often. Working out was a healthy way of dealing with the loneliness.
To this day, when I work out I usually listen to ballads. I prefer to work out alone. It enables me to concentrate on the lessons that the Iron has for me. Learning about what you're made of is always time well spent, and I have found no better teacher. The Iron had taught me how to live. Life is capable of driving you out of your mind. The way it all comes down these days, it's some kind of miracle if you're not insane. People have become separated from their bodies. They are no longer whole. I see them move from their offices to their cars and on to their suburban homes. They stress out constantly, they lose sleep, they eat badly. And they behave badly. Their egos run wild; they become motivated by that which will eventually give them a massive stroke. They need the Iron Mind.
Through the years, I have combined meditation, action, and the Iron into a single strength. I believe that when the body is strong, the mind thinks strong thoughts. Time spent away from the Iron makes my mind degenerate. I wallow in a thick depression. My body shuts down my mind. The Iron is the best antidepressant I have ever found. There is no better way to fight weakness than with strength. Once the mind and body have been awakened to their true potential, it's impossible to turn back.
The Iron never lies to you. You can walk outside and listen to all kinds of talk, get told that you're a god or a total bastard. The Iron will always kick you the real deal. The Iron is the great reference point, the all-knowing perspective giver. Always there like a beacon in the pitch black. I have found the Iron to be my greatest friend. It never freaks out on me, never runs. Friends may come and go. But two hundred pounds is always two hundred pounds."
- Henry Rollins
"I train like I'm training for the Olympics or for a Mr. America contest, the way I've always trained my whole life. You see, life is a battlefield. Life is survival of the fittest... People work at dying, they don't work at living. My workout is my obligation to life. It's my tranquilizer. It's part of the way I tell the truth - and telling the truth is what's kept me going all these years." - Francois Henri "Jack" LaLanne
"Crawling is acceptable. Falling is acceptable. Puking is acceptable. Tears are acceptable. Pain is acceptable. Injury is acceptable. Quitting is unacceptable."
"Now if you want to win any battle you have to do one thing. You have to make the mind run the body. Never let the body tell the mind what to do. The body will always give up. It is always tired in the morning, noon, and night. But the body is never tired if the mind is strong."
"Lead me, follow me, or get out of my way."
- General George S. Patton US Army General
"Whenever you get a thought in your head saying "Alright, this is sufficient," ask yourself if you can push yourself further - and do it if you can - if you can't, try anyway; let your body fail you, not your brain." - hickson517
"Because you might as well be dead. Seriously, if you put limits on what you can do, physical or anything else, it'll spread over into the rest of your life. It'll spread into your work, into your morality, into your entire being. There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you. A man must constantly exceed his level." - Bruce Lee
"Perseverance is the hard work you do after you get tired of doing the hard work you already did." - Newt Gingrich
"True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care - with no one there to see or cheer." - David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
"It is natural for man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren till she transforms us into beasts... For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth, to know the worst, and to provide for it." - Patrick Henry
