On Politics:
• “If one man has no right to command all other men––the expedient of despotism––neither has he any right to command even one other man; nor yet have ten men, or a million, the right to command even one other man, for ten times nothing is nothing, and a million times nothing is nothing.” – Isabel Paterson
• “Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.” – James Bovard
• “For why should my freedom be determined by someone else's conscience?” – I Corinthians 10:29
• “It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.” – Voltaire
• “Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.” – Herbert Marcuse
• “The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.” – Ayn Rand
• “There are laws that enslave men, and laws that set them free. Either what we hold to be right and good and true is right and good and true for all mankind or we're just another robber tribe.” – King Arthur, First Knight
• “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.” – Unknown, largely attributed to Lord Alexander Tytler
• “Only fools fight over who owns a cottage while it burns down around them” – Ser Bryant, Dragon Age: Origins
• “A government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.” – Ayn Rand
• “With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably.” – Judge Aaron Satie, Star Trek: The Next Generation
• “So this is how liberty dies… With thunderous applause.” – Padmé Amidala, Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith
• “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.” – Benito Mussolini
• “Libertarianism is the very heart and soul of conservatism.” – Ronald Reagan
On Religion:
• “Question with boldness the very existence of God, for if there be a God, He must surely rather honest questioning over blindfolded fear.” – Thomas Jefferson
• “Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones. I am not afraid.” - Marcus Aurelius
• “I don't object to the concept of a deity, but I'm baffled by the notion of one that takes attendance.” – Amy Farrah Fowler, The Big Bang Theory
• “Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.” – Anonymous
• “In the best case, religion gives people bad reasons to be good where good reasons are actually available and in the worst case, it separates moral thinking from the actual details of human and animal suffering.” – Sam Harris
• “Why is it that when I talk about belief, you always think I'm talking about God?” – Shepard Book, Serenity
• “Ironically, guys like Jerry Falwell insist on interpreting the Good Book very literally. But put them in front of Teletubbies, and suddenly they become masters of subtext, cultural analysis, and innuendo. Go figure.” – Susan Jane Gilman
• “I may have some very conservative personal feelings but I feel everyone has the right to live their life differently. I might think what you do will put you in hell but I'm going to defend your right to get there.” – Rev. Al Sharpton
• “The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.” – Albert Einstein
• “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out God hates all the same people you do.” – Anne Lamott
On Morality:
• “[Q]uestions about values … are really questions about the well-being of conscious creatures. Values, therefore, translate into facts that can be scientifically understood.” – Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape
• “For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbors – between those who preached that the good is self–sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the good is self–sacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it.” – Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
• “It's not enough to survive... one has to be worthy of survival” – William Adama, Battlestar Galactica
• “Through centuries of scourges and disasters, brought about by your code of morality, you have cried that your code had been broken, that the scourges were punishment for breaking it, that men were too weak and too selfish to spill all the blood it required. You damned man, you damned existence, you damned this earth, but never dared to question your code. Your victims took the blame and struggled on, with your curses as reward for their martyrdom–while you went on crying that your code was noble, but human nature was not good enough to practice it. And no one rose to ask the question: Good? By what standard?” – Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
• “One does not bargain about inches of evil.” – Ayn Rand
On Individualism:
• “No society can ever be so large as one man.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “I think it's a mistake to ever look for hope outside of one's self.” – Arthur Miller, After the Fall
• “To be nobody but yourself in a world that's doing its best to make you somebody else, is to fight the hardest battle you are ever going to fight. Never stop fighting.” – e e Cummings
• “This above all, to thine own self be true.” – Polonius, Hamlet
• “Being a man is the continuing battle for one's life. One loses a bit of manhood with every stale compromise to the authority of any power in which one does not believe.” – H. Rap Brown
• “It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
On Society:
• “What good fortune for those in power that people do not think.” – Adolph Hitler
• “I am, as I've said, merely competent. But in an age of incompetence, that makes me extraordinary.” – Billy Joel
• “Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf.” – Orson Scott Card
• “That boy is vulnerable. He has too great a capacity for joy. What will he do with it in a world where there's so little occasion for it?” – Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
• “I keep thinking that parties are intended to be celebrations, and celebrations should be only for those who have something to celebrate.” – Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
• “Human behavior is economic behavior. The particulars may vary, but competition for limited resources remains a constant.” – CEO Nwabudike Morgan, Alpha Centauri
On Truth:
• “We tell lies when we are afraid... afraid of what we don't know, afraid of what others will think, afraid of what will be found out about us. But every time we tell a lie, the thing that we fear grows stronger.” – Tad Williams
• “And then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” – John 8:32
• “Whoever rebukes a person will afterward find more favor than one who flatters with the tongue.” – Proverbs 28:23
• “The power of accurate observation is frequently called cynicism by those who don't have it.” – George Bernard Shaw
• “The engineer does not believe in black magic, voodoo, or rain dances. The engineer believes in scientific truth, that is, truth that can be verified by experiment.” – Samuel Florman
• “I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and incur my own abhorrence.” – Frederick Douglass
On Happiness:
• “I went to kindergarten and they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said I wanted to be happy. They told me I didn't understand the question, and I told them they didn't understand life.” – Unknown
• “Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?” – Matthew 6:27
• “A cheerful heart is good medicine.” – Proverbs 17:22
• “Dance like nobody’s watching; love like you’ve never been hurt. Sing like nobody’s listening; live like it’s heaven on earth.” – Mark Twain.
On Motivation:
• “Some people see things the way they are and ask 'Why?'. Others dream of things that never were and ask 'Why not?'“ – George Bernard Shaw
• “Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan “Press On” has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.” – Calvin Coolidge
• “Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “Sometimes, you have to be your own white knight.” – Fiona Glenanne, Burn Notice
On Education:
• “Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you will help them become what they are capable of becoming.” – Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
• “You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself.” – Galielo Galilei
• “Teaching is creating situations in which students can escape only by thinking.” – Anonymous
• “Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as a hard duty.” – Albert Einstein
• “Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school.” – Albert Einstein
On Logic:
• “Life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think.” – Jean de la Bruyère
• “If in other sciences we should arrive at certainty without doubt and truth without error, it behooves us to place the foundations of knowledge in mathematics.” – Roger Bacon
• “It is absurd to hold that a man ought to be ashamed of being unable to defend himself with his limbs but not of being unable to defend himself with speech and reason, when the use of reason is more distinctive of a human being than the use of his limbs.” – Aristotle
• “An emotion that clashes with your reason, an emotion that you cannot explain or control, is only the carcass of that stale thinking which you forbade your mind to revise.” – Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
On Emotion:
• “Whenever anyone accuses some person of being 'unfeeling,' he means that a person is just. He means that that person has no causeless emotions and will not grant him a feeling which he does not deserve. He means that 'to feel' is to go against reason, against moral values, against reality.” – Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
• “He who has overcome his fears will truly be free.” – Aristotle
• “But this and his pleasure in it, his glory in the phrases he made, in the ardour of youth, in his wife’s beauty, in the tributes that reached him … all had to be deprecated and concealed under the phrase “talking nonsense,” because, in effect, he had not done the thing he might have done. It was a disguise; it was the refuge of a man afraid to own his own feelings, who could not say, This is what I like – this is what I am.” – Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
• “A feeling that changes never existed in the first place.” Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
On Love:
• “A man who fears nothing is a man who loves nothing; and if you love nothing, what joy is there in your life?” – King Arthur, First Knight
• “I ain’t so afraid of losing something that I ain’t gonna try to have it.” – Zoe Alleyne, Firefly
• “That “I love you” has to begin within. If you don’t love yourself, however are you to love me?” – Laura Munson
• “Though I may speak with bravest fire
And have the gift to all inspire
And have not love, my words are vain –
As sounding brass – and hopeless gain.” – Hal Hobson, The Gift of Love
• “Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.” – Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
On Beauty:
• “Those who assert that the mathematical sciences say nothing of the beautiful or the good are in error. … The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness, which the mathematical sciences demonstrate in a special degree.” – Aristotle
• “After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce in esthetics, plasticity, and form. The greatest scientists are always artists as well.” – Albert Einstein
On Language:
• “Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.” – J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
• “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.” – William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
• “There are some that only employ words for the purpose of disguising their thoughts.” – Voltaire
On Life:
• “There is not one shred of evidence to suggest the notion that life is meant to be taken seriously.” – Anonymous
• “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” – Albert Einstein
• “Every man dies. Not every man truly lives.” – William Wallace, Braveheart
• “There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or nonexistence—and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not: it depends on a specific course of action. Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist. It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: the issue of life or death. Life is a process of self–sustaining and self–generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies; its chemical elements remain, but its life goes out of existence. It is only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept of ‘Value’ possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.” – Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
• “How we deal with death is at least as important as how we deal with life.” – James T. Kirk, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
• “There are many parts of my youth that I'm not proud of. There were... loose threads - untidy parts of me that I would like to remove. But when I pulled on one of those threads - it unraveled the tapestry of my life.” – Captain Jean Luc Picard, Star Trek: The Next Generation
Miscellaneous:
• “If knowledge is power, than to be unknown is to be unconquerable.” – Star Trek: Birth of the Federation
• “A quest for self–respect is proof of its lack.” – Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
• “It's good if you have enemies. It means you stood up for something in life.” – Winston Churchill
• “Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.” – Albert Einstein
• “Sure as I know anything, I know this - they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten? They'll swing back to the belief that they can make people... better. And I do not hold to that. So no more runnin'. I aim to misbehave.” – Captain Malcolm Reynolds, Serenity
• “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.” – John Wesley
That's my collection.