Chuck > Chuck's Quotes

“As man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul.”
― Ayn Rand

“How good do you want to be?”
― Jay Light, Essays for Oboists: More "Straight Talk" about achieving success as an oboist (or any other wind player) From the author of THE OBOE REED BOOK

“A gracefully effortless floating, flowing and flying are the essentials of the ballet’s image of man.”
― Ayn Rand, The Romantic Manifesto

“Whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man's nature and of life's potential.”
― Ayn Rand

“Place nothing above the verdict of your own mind.”
― Ayn Rand

“Blessed are they who believe in what is best for them, for never shall their minds be terrorized.”
― Anton La Vey

“Whose trip do you think this is, anyhow?”
― Jay Light, Essays for Oboists: More "Straight Talk" about achieving success as an oboist (or any other wind player) From the author of THE OBOE REED BOOK

“I dream big.”
― Mariah Carey

“A culture is made — or destroyed — by its articulate voices.”
― Ayn Rand

“They professed to love him for some unknown reason and they ignored all the things for which he could wish to be loved.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“People are not embracing collectivism because they have accepted bad economics. They are accepting bad economics because they have embraced collectivism.”
― Ayn Rand

“India has a population greater than Europe and North America combined. It's land area exceeds France, Germany, Great Britain, Iraq, Japan, Paraguay, and Ghana put together, and its citizens are that similar. They get along as well as everybody at the UN does....To all this, the Bharatiya Janata Party responds with a slogan: 'ONE NATION, ONE PEOPLE, ONE CULTURE'.”
― P.J. O'Rourke

“Russia has never had a Renaissance; it has never had a Reformation.,,, Such Industrial Revolution as it had was nipped and twisted by the Communists. Russia had no Roaring 20s, no Booming 50s, no Swinging 60s, no Me Generation. It's been just one Them Generation after another.”
― P J O'Rourke

“No, everything will not be all right if we just talk it over, face facts, use our noodles.”
― P. J. O'Rourke

“There has never been a philosophy, a theory or a doctrine that attacked (or “limited”) reason, which did not also preach submission to the power of some authority.”
― Ayn Rand, The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

“They're not exactly sinister and crafty demons, and they're not exactly world-saviors, and they sure aren't interested in peace and harmony, or in war and disorder. What communists are, after all, is just a bunch of sloppy office workers in ill-fitting clothes who want desperately to be like us.”
― P.J. O'Rourke

“The sternest commissar and the wildest hippie both share the same daydream: that a thing can be worth other than people are willing to give for it.”
― P. J. O'Rourke

“Liberal" is one of those fine English words, like "lady" "gay" or "welfare" that have been spoiled by special pleading. So by "liberal I certainly don't mean tolerant or open-handed people or even big-government Democrats. I mean anyone who is excited that 1% of Ben and Jerry's profits go to promote world peace.”
― P.J.O'Rourke

“And what a bar brawl it is -- polemics tossed, dialectics smashed, chairs of empiricism smashed over heads of ideology, aged prejudices heaved through windows of young opinion, theories given the bum's rush by facts.”
― P. J. O'Rourke

“Anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today.”
― Ayn Rand

“When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is learning to understand and control the behavior of crop plants and domestic animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized.”
― Ayn Rand

“Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.”
― Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism

“The Devil, I shall leave strictly alone. The association between him and me in the public mind has gone quite as far as I wish; in some quarters it has reached the level of confusion, if not of identification. I begin to realize the truth of the adage that he who sups with that formidable host needs a long spoon.”
― C S Lewis

“Among flippant people, the joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it....
[Flippancy] is a thousand miles away from joy; it deadens, instead of sharpening the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practice it.”
― C S Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“Reason functions by integrating perceptual data into concepts.”
― Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It

“I have known a human defended from strong temptations to social ambition by a still stronger taste for tripe and onions.”
― C S Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“Here's the everlasting rub: neither am I good nor bad.
I'd give up my halo for a horn and the horn for the hat I once had.”
― Jethro Tull

“Aristotle may be regarded as the cultural barometer of Western history. Whenever his influence dominated the scene, it paved the way for one of history's brilliant eras; whenever it fell, so did mankind.”
― Ayn Rand

“A philosophic system is an integrated view of existence.
As a human being you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation - or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single solid weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind's wings should have grown.”
― Ayn Rand

“I believed love was all you need. I believed you should be here now. I believed drugs could make everyone a better person. I believed I could hitchhike to California with 35 cents and people would be glad to feed me. I believed Mao was cute. I believed private property was wrong. I believed my girlfriend was a witch. I believed my parents were Nazi space monsters. I believed the university was putting saltpeter in the cafeteria food. I believed stones had souls. I believed the NLF were the good guys in Vietnam. I believed Lyndon Johnson was plotting to murder all the Negroes. I believed Yoko Ono was an artist. I believed Bob Dylan was a musician. I believed I would live forever or until I was 21, whichever came first. I believed the world was coming to an end. I believed the Age of Aquarius was about to begin. I believed the I Ching said to cut classes and take over the Dean's office. I believed wearing my hair long would end poverty and injustice. I believed there was a great throbbing web of cosmic mucus and we were all part of it somehow. I managed to believe Gandhi and H. Rap Brown at the same time. With the exception of anything my mom and dad said, I believed everything.”
― P J O'Rourke