Lynn > Lynn's Quotes

“Do what you love and work for whom you admire the most, and you've given yourself the best chance in life you can.”
― Warren Buffett, The Snowball

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn't read all the time -- none, zero. You'd be amazed at how much Warren reads--and at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I'm a book with a couple of legs sticking out.”
― Charles T. Munger, Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false. ”
― Paul Johnson

“You know, doing what is right is easy. The problem is knowing what is right.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson

“There's nothing of any importance in life - except how well you do your work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are, will come from that. It's the only measure of human value. All the codes of ethics they'll try to ram down your throat are just so much paper money put out by swindlers to fleece people of their virtues. The code of competence is the only system of morality that's on a gold standard.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Order and simplification are the first steps towards mastery of a subject”
― Thomas Mann

“The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.”
― Margaret Thatcher

“A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.”
― Milton Friedman

“Many who are self-taught far excel the doctors, masters, and bachelors of the most renowned universities.”
― Ludwig von Mises

“The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are. Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community. Always attribute his success to the exploitation, the cheating, the more or less open robbery of others. Never under any circumstances admit that your own failure may be owing to your own weakness, or that the failure of anyone else may be due to his own defects - his laziness, incompetence, improvidence, or stupidity.”
― Henry Hazlitt

“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.”
― John Maynard Keynes

“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine the can design.”
― F. A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism

“Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it's yours.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.”
― Will Durant

“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

“On matters of style, swim with the current, on matters of principle, stand like a rock.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“Time is the coin of your life. You spend it. Do not allow others to spend it for you.”
― Carl Sandburg

“I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.”
― Sir Isaac Newton

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“No persons are more frequently wrong, than those who will not admit they are wrong.”
― François de La Rochefoucauld

“If someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth and that in reality the truth were outside of Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Complete Letters, 1868-1871

“A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes - within the limits of endowment and environment- he has made out of himself. In the concentration camps, for example, in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.”
― Michelangelo Buonarroti

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”
― Ronald Reagan

“Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”
― Benjamin Franklin