|
Home Music My Music Programming Photo Gallery Philosophy Weight Training Investing Quotes About Me Contact Me: neil "at" stringtension "dot" com |
Here is a collection of great quotations that I have happened upon, divided roughly into topical groups.. Philosophy
"My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with
his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive
achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute."
"The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters.
And intends to be the master."
"Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal
every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of
a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of
reason, than that of blindfolded fear."
"I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the
world, and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one
redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology."
"Facts are stubborn things, and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the
dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."
"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club."
"Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you
nothing. It was here first."
"The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity
and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exaulted
activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy...neither
its pipes nor its theories will hold water."
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
"There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the
fashionable non-conformist."
"The man who is always worrying about whether or not his soul would
be damned generally has a soul that isn't worth a damn."
"[T]he battle they lost can never be lost. For that which they died to
save can never perish. Through all the darkness, through all the shame
of which men are capable, the spirit of man will remain alive on this
earth. It may sleep, but it will awaken. It may wear chains, but it will
break through. And man will go on. Man, not men."
"Experience keeps a hard school, but a fool will learn in no other."
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are
always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."
Politics
"Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to
live at the expense of everybody else."
"Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's
whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization
is the process of setting man free from men."
"The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on
Earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but
only to have the law of nature for his rule."
"The U.S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit
of it. You have to catch up with it yourself."
"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its
victims may be the most oppressive.....those who torment us, for our
own good, will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval
of their own conscience."
"Freedom...refer[s] to a social relationship among people -- namely, the
absence of force as a prospective instrument of decision making. Freedom
is reduced whenever a decision is made under threat of force, whether or
not force actually materializes or is evident in retrospect."
"Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this
consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the
triumph."
"America's founding ideal was the principle of individual rights. Nothing
more--and nothing less. The rest--everything that America achieved,
everything she became, everything 'noble and just,' and heroic, and great,
and unprecedented in human history--was the logical consequence of
fidelity to that one principle."
"What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the
blood and treasure of the human race."
"I will never depend on so slender a protection as the possibility of
being represented by virtuous men."
"Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right
to but himself. The labor of his body and the work of his hands are
properly his."
"What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that
they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it.
When you go down that road, don't expect freedom to survive very long."
"It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can
stand by itself."
"How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four.
Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg."
"When the government's boot is on your throat, whether it is a left
boot or a right boot is of no consequence."
"If pigs could vote, the man with the slop bucket would be elected
swineherd every time, no matter how much slaughtering he did on the side."
"The government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the
support of Paul."
"Government is not reason, it is not eloquence - it is force!
Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearsome master."
"Collectivism goes a step below savage anarchy: it takes away from man
even the chance to fight back. It makes violence legal -- and resistance
to it illegal. It gives the sanction of law to the organized brute force
of a majority (or of anyone who claims to represent it)-and turns the
minority into a helpless, disarmed object of extermination. If you can
think of a more vicious perversion of justice -- name it."
"Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an
intellectual could ignore or evade it."
"Nothing appeals to intellectuals more than the feeling that they
represent 'the people.' Nothing, as a rule, is further from the truth."
"Democracy is a terrible form of Government. Unfortunately, all the others
we have tried are much worse."
"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner."
"The only difference between death and taxes is that death doesn't
get worse every time Congress meets."
"It is...as necessary to defend an individual against the majority
in a democracy as against the king in a monarchy."
"It is precisely those things which belong to 'the people' which have
historically been despoiled -- wild creatures, the air, and waterways
being notable examples. This goes to the heart of why property rights
are socially important in the first place. Property rights mean
self-interested monitors. No owned creatures are in danger of extinction.
No owned forests are in danger of being leveled. No one kills the goose
that lays the golden egg when it is his goose."
"Of all the statist violations of individual rights in a mixed economy,
the military draft is the worst. It is an abrogation of rights. It
negates man's fundamental right--the right to life--and establishes the
fundamental principle of statism: that a man's life belongs to the
state, and the state may claim it by compelling him to sacrifice it in
battle. Once that principle is accepted, the rest is only a matter of time.
If the state may force a man to risk death or hideous maiming and
crippling, in a war declared at the state's discretion, for a cause he
may neither approve of nor even understand, if his consent is not
required to send him into unspeakable martyrdom--then, in principle, all
rights are negated in that state, and its government is not man's
protector any longer. What else is there left to protect?"
"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and
degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing
is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is
willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal
safety, is a miserable creature, and has no chance of being free unless
made or kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."
"Pacifism is a shifty doctrine under which a man accepts the benefits
of the social group without being willing to pay -- and claims a halo
for his dishonesty."
"Nobody is equal to anybody. Even the same man is not equal to himself
on different days."
"The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny
individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities."
"Some folks look at me and see a certain swagger, which in
Texas is called walking."
"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the
system, but too early to shoot the bastards."
"Nobody would put as little thought and effort into buying an automobile
as they put into deciding who to elect as President of the United States."
Weight Training
"The principle that I am advocating, the one that makes it possible for the
bodybuilder to actualize his potential in a very short time, is that neither
'more is better' nor 'less is better,' but 'precise is best.'"
"Those who do not find time for exercise now will have to find time for illness."
"Fatigue makes cowards of us all."
"The Iron never lies to you... Friends may come and go. But two hundred
pounds is always two hundred pounds."
Music
"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture."
"A brilliant riff is more important than an exposed midriff."
"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long
plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men
die like dogs.....There's also a negative side."
"Once you become predictable, no one's interested anymore."
"Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so?
Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live.
Before they know it, time runs out."
"When John Stuart Mill was a young man, he worried that we were
running out of music, since there were only 8 notes and therefore
there was only a finite amount of music possible. At that point
Brahms and Tchaikovsky had not yet been born nor jazz created."
Libations
"Fill with mingled cream and amber,
"I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me."
"Why do strong arms fatigue themselves with frivolous dumbbells?
To dig a vineyard is worthier exercise for men."
"I don't like the Olympics. Too much ice wasted. The only thing ice is
good for is being surrounded by scotch."
Miscellaneous/Humorous
"You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline.
It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear
weapons, but at the very least you need a beer."
"Tough guys don't dance. You had better believe it."
"A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn no
other way."
"The very existence of flame-throwers proves that some time,
somewhere, someone said to themselves, 'You know, I want to set
those people over there on fire, but I'm just not close enough
to get the job done.'"
|