R

• The concept of God as a loving, all-powerful person, who created us, who has a plan for us, who issues commandments, and who is ready to receive us into Heaven, is a substantial concept, rich in meaning and significance for human life. But if we take away all this, and leave only the idea of an original cause, it is questionable whether the same word should even be used. By keeping the original word, we delude ourselves into thinking that we are talking about the same thing.
• Which is important to us--life in the biological sense, or life in the biographical sense? Plainly, the latter seems more important. Our lives are the sum of all we hold dear; our projects, our activities, our loves and friendships, and all the rest. Being alive, by contrast, is valuable to us only in so far as it enables us to carry out our lives. This is most evident when we consider the extreme case in which a person, while still alive, has lost the capacity for having a life, such as a person in irreversible coma. Being alive, sadly, does such a person no good at all. The value of being alive may therefore be understood as instrumental; being alive is important to an individual because it enables him or her to have a life.

• I base most of my fashion taste on what doesn’t itch.

• The anarchists are always accused of a lack of realism, but ... they are the only realists in the world. Because anarchists dare to affirm that truth, justice, and personal liberty are true universals, truths that can guide and form all of our thoughts and actions.

• Not a day passes over the earth, but men and women of no note do great deeds, speak great words and suffer noble sorrows.

• The United States has much to offer the third world war." Ronald Reagan repeated this error 9 times in the same speech.
• Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.

• O Lord, if there is a Lord, same my soul, if I have a soul.
• No miracle has ever taken place under conditions which science can accept. Experience shows, without exception, that miracles occur only in times and in countries in which miracles are believed in, and in the presence of persons who are disposed to believe them.

• I have been reading the Old Testament, a most bloodthirsty and perilous book for the young. Jehovah is beyond doubt the worst character in fiction.

• Half the lies our opponents tell about us are not true.

• Political rights do not exist because they have been legally set down on a piece of paper, but only when they have become the ingrown habits of a people, and when any attempt to impair them will meet with the violent resistance of the populace. Where this is not the case, there is no help in any parliamentary opposition or any Platonic appeals to the constitution.

• They'll have to shoot me first to take my gun.

• Let Wall Street have a nightmare and the whole country has to help get them back in bed again.
• I don't make jokes; I just watch the government and report the facts.
• Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.
• World ain't going to be saved by nobody's scheme. It's fellows with schemes that got us into this mess. Plans get you into things, but you got to get yourself out.
• The more you read and observe about this Politics thing, you got to admit that each party is worse than the other. The one that's out always looks the best.
• You can't say civilization don't advance ... for in every war they kill you a new way.
• The Income Tax has made more Liars out of the American people than golf has.
• In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write, but evidently can't read. If they could read their stuff, they'd stop writing.

• I have told you once and I will tell you again--your boys will not be sent into any foreign wars.

• The only man who never makes a mistake is the man who never does anything.
• A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.

• That an act, qua fulfilling a promise, or qua effecting a just distribution of good, or qua returning services rendered, or qua promoting the good of others, or qua promoting the virtue or insight of the agent, is prima facie right, is self-evident; not in the sense that it is evident from the beginning of our lives, or as soon as we attend to the proposition for the first time, but in the sense that when we have reached sufficient mental maturity and have given sufficient attention to the proposition it is evident without any need of proof, or of evidence beyond itself. It is self-evident just as a mathematical axiom, or the validity of a form of inference, is evident. The moral order expressed in these propositions is just as much a part of the fundamental nature of the universe (and, we may add, of any possible universe in which there were moral agents at all) as is the spatial or numerical structure expressed in the axioms of geometry or arithmetic.

• Kill one man and you are a murderer. Kill millions and you are a conqueror. Kill all and you are God.

• Gorbachev’s stance contrasts admirably with the policy of the sainted Abraham Lincoln, who used massive force and mass murder to force the seceding Southern states to remain in the Union.
• In World War I, no one ‘appeased’ anyone else, everyone was ultra-hawkish, mobilized, and hanged tough, and the result was a momentous, totally disastrous, and useless four-year war that devastated Europe beyond repair, and ineluctably set the stage for the victories of Communism and Nazism, neither of which would have gotten anywhere if peace had prevailed. War-hawk theory is not only grievously and evidently incorrect, it has the blood of countless millions on its hands.
• Hatred is my muse.

• In olden times sacrifices were made at the altar--a practice which is still continued.
• When you see what some girls marry, you realize how much they must hate to work for a living.

• The best government is the one that charges you the least blackmail for leaving you alone.

• Evil is not what you do to yourself, only what you do to others. If you deal wrongly with yourself you are foolish or careless or shortsighted, but if you deal wrongly with others you have done evil.

• It may be that the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong--but that's the way to bet.

• Cruelty to brute animals is another means of destroying moral sensibility.

• The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent full of doubt.
• Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.
• One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways.
• There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths.
• The most savage controversies are those about matters to which there is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic.
• Those who have seised power, even for the noblest of motives, soon persuade themselves that there are good reasons for not relinquishing it. This is particularly likely to happen if they believe themselves to represent some immensely important cause. They will feel that their opponents are ignorant and perverse; before long they will come to hate them .. The important thing is to keep their power, not to use it as a means to an eventual paradise. And so what were means become ends, and their original ends are forgotten except on Sundays.
• There is no evidence that there is any advantage in belonging to a pure race. The purest races now in existence are the Pygmies, the Hottentots, and the Australian aborigines; the Tasmanians, who were probably even purer, are extinct.
• But schools are out to teach patriotism; newspapers are out to stir up excitement; and politicians are out to get re-elected. None of the three, therefore, can do anything whatever toward saving the human race from reciprocal suicide.

• ... the phrase "socialist economist" is a contradiction in terms. Economics deals with consumer and producer choice in a market economy; socialism deals with the arbitrary edicts of officials in a controlled society. Economics is to socialism as astronomy is to astrology. Economists are scientists who search for cause and effect in their field, without prejudice. Socialists, without exception, have a preconceived notion of what a society of men should be.

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