Brando Eaton

My philosophy, in essence, is of man as a heroic being with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity and reason as his only absolute...
--Ayn Rand

Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
--Ben Franklin

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
--Evelyn Beatrice Hall

To love is to value. Only a rationally selfish man, a man of self-esteem, is capable of love - because he is the only man capable of holding firm, consistent, uncompromising, unbetrayed values. The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone.
--Ayn Rand

The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.
--Aristotle

Today, when a concerted effort is made to obliterate this point, it cannot be repeated too often that the Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals- that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government- that it is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizen's protection against the government.
--Ayn Rand

No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the sum of his knowledge.
--Ayn Rand

And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride. This god, this one word: 'I.'
--Ayn Rand

Iron rusts from disuse; stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.
--Leonardo da Vinci

Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.
--George Washington

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
--Epicurus

Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves.
--Lord Byron

Tyrants can only rule by the consent of their people.
--Terry Goodkind

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
--H. L. Mencken

It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.
--Thomas Jefferson

That something happened to you is of no importance to anyone, not even to you. The important thing about you is what you choose to make happen - your values and choices. That which happened by accident - what family you were born into, in what country, and where you went to school - is totally unimportant.
--Ayn Rand

An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.
--Robert A. Heinlein

It is not the critic who counts, nor the person who points out how the strong person stumbled or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the person who is actually in the arena; whose face is actually marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again, who knows great enthusiasm and great devotions, whose life is spent in a worthy cause; who, at best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and at worst, if failure wins out, it at least wins with greatness, so that this person's place shall never be with those timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
--Theodore Roosevelt

I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.
--Robert A. Heinlein

Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread.
--Thomas Jefferson

Men are so simple of mind, and so much dominated by their immediate needs, that a deceitful man will always find plenty who are ready to be deceived.
--Niccolo Machiavelli

Men give me credit for some genius. All the genius I have lies in this; when I have a subject in hand, I study it profoundly. Day and night it is before me. My mind becomes pervaded with it. Then the effort that I have made is what people are pleased to call the fruit of genius. It is the fruit of labor and thought.
--Alexander Hamilton

Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add within the limits of the law, because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.
--Thomas Jefferson

Of men who have a sense of honor, more come through alive than are slain, but from those who flee comes neither glory nor any help.
--Homer

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
--Galileo Galilei

Are you bored with life? Then throw yourself into some work you believe in with all you heart, live for it, die for it, and you will find happiness that you had thought could never be yours.
--Dale Carnegie

I'm working to improve my methods, and every hour I save is an hour added to my life.
--Ayn Rand

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow citizens.
--Adam Smith

Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one.
--Richard Dawkins

There is nothing so likely to produce peace as to be well prepared to meet the enemy.
--George Washington

What is it to be spiritual? To recognize the finer harmonies of conduct -- to live to the ideal -- to separate the incidental, the evanescent, from the perpetual -- to be enchanted with the perfect melody of truth -- open to the influences of the artistic, the beautiful, the heroic -- to shed kindness as the sun sheds light -- to recognize the good in others, and to include the world in the idea of self -- that is to be spiritual. There is nothing spiritual in the worship of the unknown and unknowable, in the self-denial of a slave at the command of a master whom he fears. Fastings, prayings, mutilations, kneelings, and mortification are either the result of, or result in, insanity.
--Robert Green Ingersoll

Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world.
--Lucille Ball

It's a helluva start, being able to recognize what makes you happy.
--Lucille Ball

You can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.
--Robert A. Heinlein

The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who remain neutral in time of great moral crisis.
-- Dante Alighieri

There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.
--Ayn Rand

We are free to evade the effort of thinking-to reject reason-but we are not free to avoid the penalty of the abyss we refuse to see.
--Terry Goodkind

It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him.
--Arthur C. Clarke

I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.
--Ayn Rand

Man's character is the product of his premises.
--Ayn Rand

Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are serviley crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God, because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blind faith.
--Thomas Jefferson

We did indeed know much about your preparedness. We knew that probably every second home in your country contained firearms. We knew that your country actually had state championships for private citizens shooting military rifles. We were not fools to set foot in such quicksand.
--A Japanese Admiral explains why Japan didn't invade the US mainland in WWII

Nothing to me is more revolting ..., But once war is forced on us, there is no other alternative than to apply every available means to bring it to a swift end. War's very object is victory -- not prolonged indecision. In war, indeed, there can be no substitute for victory.
--General Douglas MacArthur

I know not if this earth on which I stand is the core of the universe or if it is but a speck of dust lost in eternity. I know not and I care not. For I know what happiness is possible to me on earth. And my happiness needs no higher aim to vindicate it. My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose.
-- Ayn Rand

Enemies are the price of honor.
--Terry Goodkind

Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once. Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, it seems to me most strange that men should fear; Seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come
--William Shakespeare

I’d like to see our political leaders adopt the character of their predecessors and say that we’re not going to sacrifice liberties and cower in the face of our new enemy; we’re going to kill him.
--Walter Williams

Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man’s values, it has to be earned.
--Ayn Rand

Knowledge is a weapon. I intend to be formidably armed
--Terry Goodkind

We will die with a sword in our hands and not chains on our wings.
--Terry Goodkind

Don't shed tears for those already in the ground, until after you have brought vengeance to those who put them there. There will be time enough then.
--Terry Goodkind

Knowledge is a destination. Truth, the journey.
--Terry Goodkind

Pitty for the guilty is treason to the innocent.
--Terry Goodkind

A nation that draws too broad a difference between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking being done by cowards and its fighting by fools.
--Thucydides

Capitalism demands the best of every man -- his rationality -- and rewards him accordingly. It leaves every man free to choose the work he likes, to specialize in it, to trade his product for the products of others, and to go as far on the road of achievement as his ability and ambition will carry him.
--Ayn Rand

The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
--Ayn Rand

The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it.
--Ayn Rand

A long and wicked life followed by five minutes of perfect grace gets you into Heaven. An equally long life of decent living and good works followed by one outburst of taking the name of the Lord in vain - then have a heart attack at that moment and be damned for eternity. Is that the system?
--Robert A. Heinlein

I am an innovator. This is a term of distinction, a term of honor, rather than something to hide or apologize for. Anyone who has new or valuable ideas to offer stands outside the intellectual status quo. But the status quo is not a stream, let alone a 'mainstream'. It is a stagnant swamp. It is the innovators who carry mankind forward.
--Ayn Rand

Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow ripening fruit.
--Aristotle

The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.
--Thomas Jefferson

Right and wrong are not the product of census.
--Terry Goodkind

The flowering of human society depends on two factors: the intellectual power of outstanding men to conceive sound social and economic theories, and the ability of these or other men to make these ideologies palatable to the majority.
--Ludwig von Mises

You miss 100% of the shots you never take.
--Wayne Gretsky

Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.
--Ayn Rand

One method of destroying a concept is by diluting its meaning. Observe that by ascribing rights to the unborn, i.e., the nonliving, the anti-abortionists obliterate the rights of the living: the right of young people to set the course of their own lives.
--Ayn Rand

And the day will come, when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His Father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva, in the brain of Jupiter.
--Thomas Jefferson

Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.
--Thomas Jefferson

The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.
--Thomas Jefferson

Laws that forbid the carrying of arms... disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed one.
--Thomas Jefferson quoting Cesare Beccaria

The beauty of the second amendment is that it will not be needed until they try to take it.
--Thomas Jefferson

Show me someone without an ego, and I'll show you a loser.
--Donald Trump

I guard my treasures: my thought, my will, my freedom. And the greatest of these is freedom.
--Ayn Rand

It is self-destructive for any society to create a situation where a baby who is born into the world today automatically has pre-existing grievances against another baby born at the same time, because of what their ancestors did centuries ago. It is hard enough to solve our own problems, without trying to solve our ancestors' problems.
--Thomas Sowell

The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see.
--Ayn Rand

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowlege: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
--Charles Darwin

Contrary to the ecologists, nature does not stand still and does not maintain the kind of "equilibrium" that guarantees the survival of any particular species - least of all the survival of her greatest and most fragile product: man.
--Ayn Rand

Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.
--Will Rogers

No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent
--Abraham Lincoln

I continue to find my greatest pleasure, and so my reward, in the work that precedes what the world calls success.
--Thomas Edison

One who would have the fruit must first climb the tree.
--Thomas Fuller

Freedom exists first and foremost in the mind of the rational, thinking individual.
--Terry Goodkind

Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.
--Henry Ford

Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason so few engage in it.
--Henry Ford

I have never needed any other tool than reason, and I trust I never shall.
--Thomas Paine

Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life
--Ayn Rand

Those whom recognise the importance of reason, yet do not raise even a flickering light in protest of its demise should not be surprised when the night they fear descends upon them.
--Dwayne Davies

Let logic be your only sovereign.
--Terry Goodkind

Life is the future, not the past.
--Terry Goodkind

Deserve victory.
--Terry Goodkind

A contradiction cannot exist in reality. Not in part, nor in whole.
--Terry Goodkind

Your life is yours alone. Rise up and live it.
--Terry Goodkind