Mark McGuire > Mark's Quotes

“The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open.”
― Gunter Grass

“No system which implies control by privilege seekers has ever ended in any other way than collapse.”
― Erik Larson, In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

“Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“I simply want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Well, pray if you like, only you'd do better to use your judgment.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“I don't think badly of people. I like everybody, and I'm sorry for everybody.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Power is the sum total of the wills of the mass, transfered by express or tactic agreement to rulers chosen by the masses.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Every man had his personal habits, passions, and impulses toward goodness, beauty, and truth.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“A good player who loses at chess is genuinely convinced hat he has lost because of a mistake, and he looks for this mistake in the beginning of his game, but forgets that there were also mistakes at ever step in the course of the game, that none of his moves was perfect. The mistake he pays attention to is conspicuous only because his opponent took advantage of it.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“You fuss too much over making the "right" choice Gaius. All we need do is make a good choice, see it through, and accept the consequences.”
― Graham McNeill, Fulgrim

“Trusting someone was like holding a little water in your cupped hands - it was so easy to spill the water, and you could never get it back.”
― Ken Follet

“Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.”
― Charles Dickens

“Never close your lips to those whom you have already opened your heart.”
― Charles Dickens

“Leaves hung in the stillness like hands of the newly dead.”
― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City

“At one point during the Holmes investigation Chicago's chief of police told a Tribune reporter he'd just as soon have a squad of reporters under his command as detectives.”
― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City

“Perhaps, Herr Ditzen, it is less important where one lives than how one lives.”
― Erik Larson, In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend”
― Albert Camus

“If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world. Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human life. Whether you live or die is an absolute. Whether you have a piece of bread or not, is an absolute. Whether you eat your bread or see it vanish into a looter's stomach, is an absolute.

There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromise is the transmitting rubber tube.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live--that productive work is the process by which man's consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one's purpose, of translating an idea into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one's values--that all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine he has learned from others--that your work is yours to choose, and the choice is as wide as your mind, that nothing more is possible to you and nothing less is human--that to cheat your way into a job bigger than your mind can handle is to become a fear-corroded ape on borrowed motions and borrowed time, and to settle down into a job that requires less than your mind's full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay--that your work is the process of achieving your values, and to lose your ambition for values is to lose your ambition to live--that your body is a machine, but your mind is its driver, and you must drive as far as your mind will take you, with achievement as the goal of your road--that the man who has no purpose is a machine that coasts downhill at the mercy of any boulder to crash in the first chance ditch, that the man who stifles his mind is a stalled machine slowly going to rust, that the man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap, and the man who makes another man his goal is a hitchhiker no driver should ever pick up--that your work is the purpose of your life, and you must speed past any killer who assumes the right to stop you, that any value you might find outside your work, any other loyalty or love, can be only travelers you choose to share your journey and must be travelers going on their own power in the same direction.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“So you think that money is the root of all evil? [...] Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Did you really think we want those laws observed?" said Dr. Ferris. "We want them to be broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against... We're after power and we mean it... There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, Mr. Reardon, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on…There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“If you don't know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.”
― Ayn Rand

“Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged