1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3036
3037
3038
3039
3040
3346
3522
5443
5619
6757
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 56d359a | I think that if we are going to reform the world, and make it a better place to live in, the way to do it is not with talk about relationships of the political nature... I think that kind of approach starts it at the end and presumes the end is the beginning. Programs of a political nature are important and products of social quality that can be effective only if the underlying structure of social values is right. The social values are righ.. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| c615836 | What's new?" is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question "What is best?," a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream." -- | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 84289ab | Science grows by its mu answers more than by its yes or no answers. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 0001c93 | If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There's so much talk about the system. And so little understanding. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| bf22005 | When you've got a Chautauqua in your head, it's extremely hard not to inflict it on innocent people. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 222f4b3 | Definitions are the foundation of reason. You can't reason without them. | definitions foundation law legal-arguments logic reason words | Robert M. Pirsig | |
| 9adc8cf | The whole purpose of scientific method is to make valid distinctions between the false and the true in nature, to eliminate the subjective, unreal, imaginary elements from one's work so as to obtain an objective, true picture of reality. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 701ce5e | My personal feeling is that this is how any further improvement of the world will be done: by individuals making Quality decisions and that's all. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 72212bc | John looks at the motorcycle and he sees steel in various shapes and has negative feelings about these steel shapes and turns off the whole thing. I look at the shapes of the steel now and I see ideas. He thinks I'm working on parts. I'm working on concepts. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| d3aabd8 | not sure of much of anything these days. Maybe that's why I talk so much. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 6360409 | But technology is simply the making of things and the making of things can't by its own nature be ugly or there would be no possibility for beauty in the arts, which also include the making of things. Actually a root word of technology, , originally "art." The ancient Greeks never separated art from manufacture in their minds, and so never developed separate words for them." | history manufacturing philosophy technology | Robert M. Pirsig | |
| 76702de | it, is best served not by mules but by free men. The purpose of abolishing grades and degrees is not to punish mules or to get rid of them but to provide an environment in which that mule can turn into a free man. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 40bd9bd | If you get careless or go romanticizing scientific information, giving it a flourish here and there, Nature will soon make a complete fool out of you. It does it often enough anyway even when you don't give it opportunities. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 8781806 | The walls are cracked and water runs upon them within threads without sound, black and glistening as blood. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 358f07c | The sky is a soggy purple. | Ayn Rand | ||
| b910ad2 | At a time like this, we can't afford the luxury of thinking! | Ayn Rand | ||
| e0231e1 | It goes only down to a certain point and then it stops. As long as there is that untouched point, it's not really pain. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 8be4d31 | I'm going to die," he said aloud--and yawned. He felt no relief, no despair, no fear. The moment of his end would not grant him even the dignity of seriousness. It was an anonymous moment; a few minutes ago, he had held a toothbrush in that hand; now he held a gun with the same casual indifference." -- | Ayn Rand | ||
| ecf54c8 | He had not liked the things taught to him in college. He had been taught a great deal about social responsibility, about a life of service and self-sacrifice. Everybody had said it was beautiful and inspiring. Only he had not felt inspired. He had felt nothing at all. | Ayn Rand | ||
| c40716d | I see man as a hero. With his own happiness as his moral obligation; productive achievementbas his noblest activity and reason as the only absolute. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 61b6edf | What brought it to pass? What disaster took their reason away from men? What whip lashed them to their knees in shame and submission? The worship of the word "We." | Ayn Rand | ||
| 3f08ccf | He has once built his fortune, starting out with empty hands; now he had to rebuild his life, starting out with an empty spirit | Ayn Rand | ||
| 7b0df11 | 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. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 882a109 | Don't think of them now. Never think of pain or danger or enemies a moment longer than is necessary to fight them. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 0cf976e | He demonstrated that there was no such thing as free will, since men's creative impulses were determined, as all else, by the economic structure of the epoch in which they lived. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 09bb667 | There is no necessity for pain-why, then, is the worst pain reserved for those who will not accept its necessity? | Ayn Rand | ||
| 7a1ce1c | Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea. That presupposes the ability to think. Thinking is something one doesn't borrow or pawn. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 35eb70e | I wish I had the power to tell them that the despair of their hearts was not to be final, and their night was not without hope. For the battle they lost can never be lost. For that which they died to save can never perish. Through all the darkness, through all the shame of which men are capable, the spirit of man will remain alive on this earth. It may sleep, but it will awaken. It may wear chains, but it will break through. And man will go.. | choices darkness freedom lost overcoming | Ayn Rand | |
| 6670fda | She felt a bored indifference toward the immediate world around her...She took it as a regrettable accident, to be borne patiently for a while, that she happened to be imprisoned among people who were dull. | boring dagny-taggart dull indifference people | Ayn Rand | |
| 958bb5e | The course led them to the moment when, in answer to the highest of one's values, one's spirit makes one's body become the tribute, recasting it--as proof, as sanction, as reward--into a single sensation of such intensity of joy that no other sanction of one's existence is necessary. | Ayn Rand | ||
| ccbebd0 | No matter what night preceded it, she had never known a morning when she did not feel the rise of a quiet excitement that became a tightening energy in her body and a hunger for action in her mind--because this was the beginning of day and it was a day of her life. | dagny-taggart life | Ayn Rand | |
| 2239ede | It is eminently reasonable that men should seek to associate with those who share their convictions and values. It is impossible to deal or even to communicate with men whose ideas are fundamentally opposed to one's own (and one should be free not to deal with them). All proper associations are formed or joined by individual choice and on conscious, intellectual grounds (philosophical, political, professional, etc.)--not by the physiologica.. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 8785b75 | Your subconscious is like a computer--more complex a computer than men can build--and its main function is the integration of your ideas. Who programs it? Your conscious mind. If you default, if you don't reach any firm convictions, your subconscious is programmed by chance--and you deliver yourself into the power of ideas you do not know you have accepted. But one way or the other, your computer gives you print-outs, daily and hourly, in t.. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 3f74c7d | When a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law, men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims, then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality.. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 1f3029c | And now we look upon the earth and sky. This spread of naked rock and peaks and moonlight is like a world ready to be born, a world that waits. It seems to us it asks a sign from us, a spark, a first commandment. We cannot know what word we are to give, nor what great deed this earth expects to witness. We know it waits. It seems to say it has great gifts to lay before us. We are to speak. We are to give its goal, its highest meaning to all.. | Ayn Rand | ||
| d02dc80 | If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose--because it contains all the distinctions of the others--the fact that they were the people who created the phrase "to make money". No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity--to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wea.. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 4b8a66c | It's arguable that Ayn Rand's finest achievement was crashing the economy twenty-five years after her death. | Jarett Kobek | ||
| 75e52e4 | We asked so many questions that the Teachers forbade it. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 748f19b | Everything that isn't permitted by The Law is forbidden. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 59f8d66 | May knowledge come to us! What is this secret our heart has understood and yet will not reveal to us, although it seems to beat as if it were endeavoring to tell it? | secret | Ayn Rand | |
| 3f02555 | The Council of Scholars has said that we all know the things which exist and therefore the things which are not known by all do not exist. | individual scientific-realism | Ayn Rand | |
| 67b3f4a | Whatever it was, he thought, whatever the strain and the agony, they were worth it, because they had made him reach this day | Ayn Rand | ||
| 3091dc7 | In times like these, when their fat little comforts are threatened, you may be sure that science is the first thing men will sacrifice. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 3faa2ce | But if my love of truth is left as my only possession, then the greater the loss behind me, the greater the pride I may take in the price I have paid for that love. Then the wreckage will not become a funeral mount above me, but will serve as a height I have climbed to attain a wider field of vision. | Ayn Rand |