Thanks for your response.
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A clarification that perhaps is needed given my prior post in this thread. By no means I am a "bleeding heart liberal", which some may think, as a result of such post.
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So we understand where I coming from, here are a few thoughts by other brighter minds, to which I subscribe.
It's Sunday, so view it as a form of Sermon <g>.
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There is only one kind of men who have never been on strike in human history. Every other kind and class have stopped, when they so wished, and have presented demands to the world, claiming to be indispensable ---except the men that have carried the world on their shoulders, have kept it alive, have endured torture as their whole payment, but have never walked out on the human race.
Well their turn has come. Let the world discover who they are, what they do and what happens when they refuse to function. This is the strike of the men of the mind."
~ John Galt.
Leader and initiator of
the strike of the men of the mind.
From Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.
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Consider the six days of Genesis as a figure of speech for what has in fact been 4 billion years. On this scale, one day equals something like six hundred and sixty-six million years, and thus, all day Monday and until Tuesday noon, creation was busy getting the world going. Life began Tuesday noon, and the beautiful organic wholeness of it developed over the next four days. At 4 pm Saturday, the big reptiles came on. Five hours later, when the redwoods appeared, there were no more big reptiles. At three minutes before midnight on the last day, man appeared. At one-fourth of a second before midnight, Christ arrived. At one-fortieth of a second before midnight, the Industrial Revolution began. We are surrounded with people who think that what we have been doing for that one-fortieth of a second can go on indefinitely. They are considered normal, but they are stark raving mad.
- David Brower
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The fact, however, that threats of Hell have their social uses is not an argument in favor of the truth of religion; it is simply an argument against the human race. More, it is probably libellous, for the overwhelming majority of men and women are not nearly so vicious as the fancy of theologians makes them out [to be]. Very few men, if Hell were proved to be a fiction tomorrow, would take to the highroad and cut throats, and very few women would turn drabs.
The God of love that they preach invariably turns out, on examination, to be a God of harsh and arbitrary penalties and brutalities, just as the brotherhood of man that they preach, brought to the test, turns out to be only a kind of hatred. Hell is still their headquarters...
~ H. L. Mencken.
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We live in a land of abounding quackeries, and if we do not learn how to laugh we succumb to the melancholy disease which afflicts the race of viewers-with-alarm... In no other country known to me is life as safe and agreeable, taking one day with another, as it is in These States. Even in a great Depression few if any starve, and even in a great war the number who suffer by it is vastly surpassed by the number who fatten on it and enjoy it. Thus my view of my country is predominantly tolerant and amiable. I do not believe in democracy, but I am perfectly willing to admit that it provides the only really amusing form of government ever endured by mankind.
~ H. L. Mencken.
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"America's founding ideal was the principle of individual rights. Nothing more and nothing less. The rest --everything that America achieved, everything she became, everything "noble" and "just", and heroic, and great, and unprecedented in human history-- was the logical consequence of fidelity to that one principle. The first consequence was the principle of political freedom, i.e. an individual's freedom from physical compulsion, coercion, or interference by the government. The next was the implementation of political freedom: The system of Capitalism."
~ Ayn Rand.
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"An individualist is a man who says: 'I will not run anyone's life - nor let anyone run mine. I will not rule or be ruled. I will not be a master nor a slave. I will not sacrifice myself to anyone - nor sacrifice anyone to myself.'"
~ Ayn Rand,
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"Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others?"
~ Thomas Jefferson, 1801 First Inaugural Address
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"I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church."
~ Thomas Paine
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"If CON is the the opposite of PRO, does that mean that CONgress is the opposite of PROgress?"
~ Gallagher
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"I think the terror most people are concerned with is the IRS."
~ Malcolm Forbes, when asked if he was afraid of terrorism
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"Regulation - which is based on force and fear - undermines the moral base of business dealings. It becomes cheaper to bribe a building inspector than to meet his standards of construction. A fly-by-night securities operator can quickly meet all the S.E.C. requirements, gain the inference of respectability, and proceed to fleece the public. In an unregulated economy, the operator would have had to spend a number of years in reputable dealings before he could earn a position of trust sufficient to induce a number of investors to place funds with him. Protection of the consumer by regulation is thus illusory."
~ Alan Greenspan
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"They have gun control in Cuba. They have universal health care in Cuba. So why do they want to come here?"
~ Paul Harvey
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"Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself."
~ Mark Twain
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"If you protect a man from folly, you will soon have a nation of fools."
~William Penn
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"National Health Insurance means combining the efficiency of the Postal Service with the compassion of the I.R.S. .... and the cost accounting of the Pentagon."
~ Louis Sullivan/Connie Horner quoted by Novak in Forbes
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"Discontent for money is just a trick of the rich to keep the poor without it."
~ Michael Corleone
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"The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost invariably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And if he is not romantic personally, he is apt to spread discontent among those who are."
~ H.L. Mencken
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"Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence."
*
"A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark."
*
"Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. .... The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure."
*
"It is inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office."
*
"The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to war... The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few butcheries cannot do it any further damage."
*
"I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind--that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking."
*
"Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all other philosophers are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself."
*
"One hears murmurs against Mussolini [1931] on the ground that he is a desperado: the real objection to him is that he is a politician."
*
"I am quite convinced that all religions, at bottom, are pretty much alike. On the surface they may seem to differ greatly, but what appears on the surface is not always religion. Go beneath it, and one finds invariably the same sense of helplessness before the cosmic mysteries, and the same pathetic attempt to resolve it by appealing to higher powers."--from Treatise on the Gods
*
It is Tertullian who is credited with the motto, Credo, quia absurdum est: I believe because it is incredible. Needless to say, he began life as a lawyer."
* All by Henry Louis Menken
U.S. Journalist and literary critic.
(1880 - 1956) |
