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Great Quotes - Post your Favorite Quotations

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I thought that was a Nietzsche quote, and it read "Against boredom, even the gods contend in vain".

Just goes to show even Nietzche had a good day once in a while.

Anyway, the quote is from Schiller. I've also seen it translated as "Against stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain." Even embellished as "..even the very gods themselves.."

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Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorius triumphs, even though checkered by failure... than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.
- Theodore Roosevelt.

The meek shall inherit nothing.

Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.

Frank Zappa

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*** Mod's note: Merged with an earlier topic. - sN ***

Post some of you fav. quotes, they don't have to be from one of Ayn Rand's books but they can.

"The finest opportunity ever given to the world was thrown away because the passion of equality made vain the hope for freedom." - Lord Acton

"The more sinful and guilty a person tends to feel, the less chance there is that he will be a happy, healthy, or law-abiding citizen. He will become a compulsive wrong-doer." - Dr. Albert Ellis

The government is good at one thing...it knows how to break your legs, and then hand you a crutch and say 'see if it weren't for the government you wouldn't be able to walk.'" - Harry Browne

Edited by softwareNerd
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Bumping this thread, in lieu of the other thread created.

I am a quote aficionado, so I'll have quite a few. Some more will come to mind and I will post them here.

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.
-Lazarus Long, Time Enough For Love by Robert Heinlein

When asked to "explain how deep squats won't screw up your femur/hips," so the person posting could explain it to his friend who believes that deep squats are harmful:

Just because some jackass asserts a thing does not mean that it is worthy of refutation. If the same guy tells you that every space shuttle launch perturbs the Earth's orbit, and that the cumulative effects are just about to start the process of the loss of the atmosphere into space, thus creating a vacuum that will destroy all life on the planet in approximately 36 hours, would you deem this necessary to refute? How much time would you spend explaining to him why this cannot happen? Would not your time be spent better doing other things? And if you devise a concise explanation, why would you assume he would understand?
-Mark Rippetoe

Let's keep this thread going!

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Some good Heinlein ones:

The universe never did make sense; I suspect it was built on government contract. –Robert Heinlein

Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well. The extremely tiny fraction who think regularly, accurately, creatively, and without self-delusion – in the long run, these are the only people who count.

-Robert Heinlein

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

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Adam was human; he didn't want the apple for the apple's sake; he wanted it because it was forbidden.

There seems to have been an actual decline in rational thinking. The United States has become a place where entertainers and professional athletes are mistaken for people of importance. They were idolized and treated as leaders; their opinions were sought on everything and they took themselves just as seriously - after all, if an athlete is paid millions or more a year, he knows he is important . . . so his opinions of foreign affairs and domestic policies must be important too, even though he proves himself to be both ignorant and sub- literate every time he opens his mouth. (Most of his fans are just as ignorant and unlettered; the disease is spreading)

Consider this:

(1) "Bread and Circuses";

(2) The abolition of the pauper's oath in Franklin Roosevelt's first term;

(3) "Peer group" promotion in public school.

These three conditions heterodyne each other. The abolition of the pauper's oath as a condition for public charity insure that habitual failures, incompetents of every sort, people who can't support themselves and people who won't, each of these would have the same voice in ruling the country, in assessing taxes and spending them, as (for example) Thomas Edison or Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Carnegie or Andrew Jackson. Peer group promotion insured that the franchise would be exercised by ignorant incompetents. And "Bread and Circuses" is what invariably happens to a democracy that goes that route: unlimited spending on "social" programs ends in national bankruptcy which historically is always followed by dictatorship.

It seems to me that these three things were the key mistakes that will destroy the best culture up to this time in all known histories. Oh, there were other things - strikes by public servants, for example. My grandfather was still alive when this became a problem. Grandfather said grimly:

“There is a ready solution for anyone on the public payroll who feels that he is not paid enough: He can resign and work for a living. This applies with equal force to Congressmen, Welfare 'clients', school teachers, generals, garbage collectors, postal workers, and judges."

It is often said: “But every man is entitled to his own opinion!".

Perhaps.

Certainly every man has his own opinion on everything, no matter how silly.

On two subjects the overwhelming majority of the people regarded their own opinions as Absolute Truth, and sincerely believed that anyone who disagreed with them was immoral, outrageous, sinful, sacrilegious, offensive, intolerable, stupid, illogical, treasonable, actionable, against the public interest, ridiculous, and obscene.

The two subjects were (of course) sex and religion.

On sex and religion each American citizen knew the One Right Answer, by direct Revelation from God.

In view of the wide diversity of opinion, most of them must necessarily have been mistaken. But on these two subjects they were not accessible to reason.

“But you must respect another man's religious beliefs! ".

For Heaven's sake, why?

Stupid is stupid - faith doesn't make it smart.

I recall one candidate’s promise that I heard during the presidential campaign, a campaign promise that seems to me to illustrate how far American rationality has skidded.

“We shall drive ever forward along this line until all our citizens have above-average incomes! ".

Nobody laughed.

The trouble with the news is that everybody knows everything too fast and too often and too many times. News has always been bad. The tiger that lives in the forest just ate your wife and kids, Joe. There are no fat grub worms under the rotten logs this year, Al. Those sickies in the village on the other side of the mountain are training hairy mammoths to stomp us flat, Pete. They nailed up two thieves and one crackpot, Mary. So devote wire service people and network people and syndication people to gathering up all the bad news they can possibly dredge and comb and scrape out of a news-tired world and have them spray it back at everyone in constant streams of electrons, and two things happen. First, we all stop listening, so they have to make it ever more horrendous to capture out attention. Secondly, we all become even more convinced that everything has gone rotten, and there is no hope at all, no hope at all. In a world of no hope the motto is semper fidelis, which means in translation, " Every week is screw-your-buddy week and his wife too, if he's out of town."

Edited by Caesar
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"The meek shall inherit the Earth. The rest of us will go to the stars." - Free Capitalist (well, he told this to me, but said he found it some Objectivist article or when talking to a person.)

This web site, http://www.conservativeforum.org/authquot.asp?ID=74, claims that the quote is Heinlein, taken from Omni magazine in 1079.

Edit: Er, make that 1979.

Edited by CWEarl
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“There are two ways of forming an opinion. One is the scientific method; the other, the scholastic. To the scientific mind, experimental proof is all-important, and theory is merely a convenience in description, to be junked when it no longer fits. To the academic mind, authority is everything, and facts are junked when they do not fit theory.”

-Robert A. Heinlein

“If you’d asked any scientist or doctor 30 years ago where stomach ulcers come from, they would all have given the same answer: obviously it comes from the acid brought on by too much stress. All of them apart from two scientists who were pilloried for their crazy, whacko theory that it was caused by a bacteria. In 2005 they won the Nobel prize. The “consensus” was wrong.”

-Ian Plimer

Edited by Mikee
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