A selection of quotations, .sig files, etc. Some of the content this page had has been moved to my Humor page.

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"There are things which could never be imagined, but there is nothing which may not happen."
Chinese aphorism
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It just amazes me how often people who know absolutely nothing about code want to tell software people their business. "Why don't they just," that's the standard phraseology. "Why don't they just" code-up something-or-other. Whenever I hear that, frankly, I just want to slap the living shit out of those people.
-- Bruce Sterling
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"clever planning and logic can never win against the sheer physical brutality of a guy who barely even knows where he is."
-- The Brunching Shuttlecocks
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History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme a lot. -- Mark Twain
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This is a stupidity of such breadth and depth that it comes with an event horizon.
-- Earl Boebert
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Wah's father, Keung and Leung were members of the CIA. Wa's father was killed by Leung when Wah was nine, he executed the revenge on his father's death after 20 years' time. During the revenge action, Wah met Lam who was Leung's lover and Sin who was Leung's daughter, he felt in love with the two ladies making a triangle love relationship, Wah having very much confusion among the loving and revenge. After the gang's slaughter, Leung died and Sin was hurt to be a human-plant with Wah's baby, Wah was so upset and painful when the revenge storm was over.
-- English description on the box of the HK movie "The Adventurers"
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Typical human lungs pack in a surface area bigger than a tennis court.
-- James Gleick, _Chaos_
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By living with strange attractors day and night, they convinced themselves that they recognized them in the flapping, shaking, beating, swaying phenomena of their everyday lives.
-- James Gleick, _Chaos_
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"He went like that," Spade said, "like a fist when you open your hand."
-- Dashiell Hammett, _The Maltese Falcon_
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  "Try and take me."
  I sat up straighter and slid my right hand back to my hip.
  He grabbed for me. I threw my body back on the bed, did the hip-spin, swung my feet at him. It was a good trick, only it didn't work. In his hurry to get at me he bumped the bed aside just enough to spill me off on the floor.
  I landed all sprawled out on my back. I kept dragging at my gun while I tried to roll under the bed.
  Missing me, his lunge carried him over the low footboard, over the side of the bed. He came down beside me, on the back of his neck, his body somersaulting over.
  I put the muzzle of my gun in his left eye and said:
  "You're making a fine pair of clowns of us. Be still while I get up or I'll make an opening in your head for brains to leak in."
-- Dashiell Hammett, _Red Harvest_
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I don't like being manhandled, even by young women who look like something out of mythology when they're steamed up.
-- Dashiell Hammett, _Red Harvest_
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  "Tough, huh," he sneered. "I've pulled the arms and legs of bigger guys than you."
  "Name two of them."
--Raymond Chandler, _Playback_
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On the dance floor a half a dozen couples were throwing themselves around with the reckless abandon of a night watchman with arthritis.
--Raymond Chandler, _Playback_
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I put my plain card, the one without the tommy gun in the corner, on her desk and asked to see Mr. Derace Kingsley.
--Raymond Chandler, _The Lady in the Lake_
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"Leave us to do the thinking sweetheart. It takes equipment."
--Raymond Chandler, _Little Sister_
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To say she had a face that would stopped a clock would have been to insult her. It would have stopped a runaway horse.
--Raymond Chandler, _Little Sister_
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While I am compelled by weight of opinion to admit to being one of the hansomest men of my generation I also have to concede that this generation is now a little seedy, and I with it.
--Raymond Chandler, letter
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The Hell With Posterity I Want Mine Now
--Raymond Chandler, letter
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"We live in what is called a democracy, rule by the majority of the people. A fine ideal if it could be made to work. The people elect, but the party machines nominate, and the part machines to be effective must spend a great deal of money. Somebody has to give it to them, and that somebody, whether it be an individual, a financial group, a trade union or what have you, expects some consideration in return."
--Raymond Chandler, _The Long Goodbye_
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"Is it enough to be an industry pundit and international sex symbol, or do I need even more?" -- Robert X. Cringely
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"I was born in Rented Rooms Five Dollars
Down on Adjacent Boulevard,
You know that funky place got no fire escape,
No vacancies, and a dirt front yard.
My mama was Nobody's fool,
He left her for a masseuse down in New Orleans,
Take the cash and flush the credit cards
Was the best advice he ever gave to me...."

"Early one mornin' with a light rain fallin'
I rode off upon my iron horse,
You seen my poster and read my rap sheet:
Armed and dangerous, no distinguishin' marks,
Wanted for all the unnatural crimes
And for havin' too much fun,
He leads the pack of one-eyed Jacks,
He's known as Harley David's son!
Aw, they say hell hath no fury
Like a woman scorned,
But all them scornful women catch their hell
From Harley David's son!"

The song was Richmond's sole creation, and Donnell approved of it; it was, like Richmond, erratic and repetitive and formless. The choruses--there were dozens, detailing the persona of a cosmic outlaw who wore a three-horned helmet--were sung over a major chord progression; Richmond talked the verses in a minor blues key, telling disconnected stories about cheap crooks and whores and perverts he had known.

"If you hear a rumblin',
It's too late to run,
Cold iron doesn't stop me
And you ain't got no silver gun,
Then your girlfriend's breast starts tremblin'
And she screams, 'Oh God! Here he comes!'
Half beast, half man, half Master Plan,
It's Harley David's son!
Aw, I'll kiss your one-eyed sister,
Hell, I'll lick her socket with my tongue!
I'm Christ-come-down-and-fucked-around,
I'm Harley David's son!"

"Past the road to Vernon's Parish,
Our tailpipe was sprayin' sparks.
The preacher in the Calvary Church
Felt cold fingers 'round his heart...."

"Now if you see a fiery fall
Of comets in the East,
Or the shadow slinkin' 'cross the moon
Of some wiry, haggard beast,
If you feel your blood congeal
And you've the urge to call a priest,
Never fear, it'll disappear,
You can rest tonight in peace."

"Well, you might want to run outside
And fall down on your face,
You might scream or you might pray
Or you might vacillate,
You might give the United Way,
But no matter what you done,
I tell you, straight,
You can't escape the fate
Of Harley David's son!
Oh, the days they've been swept away from me
Like the fires through a slum.
But when I die I'll roam the night,
The Ghost of Harley David's son!"
-- _Green Eyes__, Lucius Shepard
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"I may be wrong, but I'm not uncertain." -- Robert A. Heinlein
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Hiro watches the large, radioactive, spear-throwing killer drug lord ride his motorcycle into Chinatown. -- _Snow Crash_, Neal Stephenson
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"Even though my name has been connected--with some cause, I admit--to reports from the Scottish Highlands of the Book of Revelation's Seven-Headed Beast flapping about and dropping flaming sheep carcasses upon the heads of Sir Charles Wroth's grouse-beaters while the Whore of Babylon laughed and shouted disrespectful comments from her perch aboard the creature, yet I still believe that an open mind will absolve me of blame." -- Infernal Devices, K.W.Jeter
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We looked at each other with the clear innocent eyes of a couple of used car salesmen.
_The High Window_, Raymond Chandler
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Twelve hours to tie up a situation which I didn't even begin to understand. Either that or turn up a client and let the cops go to work on her and her whole family. Hire Marlowe and get your house full of law. Why worry? Why be doubtful and confused? Why be gnawed by suspicion? Consult cockeyed, careless, clubfooted, dissipated investigator Philip Marlowe, Glenview 7537. See me and you meet the best cops in town. Why despair? Why be lonely? Call Marlowe and watch the wagon come.
_The High Window_, Raymond Chandler
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"Talk like that to me," Morny said, "and you are liable to be wearing lead buttons on your vest."
_The High Window_, Raymond Chandler
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I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.
_Farewell, my Lovely_, Raymond Chandler
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He smiled his first smile of the day. He probably allowed himself four.
_Farewell, my Lovely_, Raymond Chandler
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She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.
_Farewell, my Lovely_, Raymond Chandler
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[...] he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.
_Farewell, my Lovely_, Raymond Chandler
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"You should see him sober. _I_ should see him sober. Somebody should see him sober. I mean, just for the record."
_The Big Sleep_, Raymond Chandler
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The muzzle of the Luger looked like the mouth of the Second Street tunnel, but I didn't move. Not being bullet proof is an idea I had had to get used to.
_The Big Sleep_, Raymond Chandler
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"I could make it my business."
He smiled tightly and pushed his hat back on his gray hair. "And I could make your business my business."
"You wouldn't like it. The pay's too small."
_The Big Sleep_, Raymond Chandler
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She was thinking. I could see, even on that short aquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her.
_The Big Sleep_, Raymond Chandler
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I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it.
_The Big Sleep_, Raymond Chandler
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The door swung shut. I started to rush it--from long practice in doing the wrong thing. In this case it didn't matter. The car outside let out a roar and when I got onto the sidewalk it was flicking a red smear of tail-light around the nearby corner. I got its license number the way I got my first million.
_Red Wind_, Raymond Chandler
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I wasn't doing any work that day, just catching up on my foot-dangling.
_Goldfish_, Raymond Chandler
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[...] I took a lot of interest in my breathing. It was something I had taken for granted for a long time, but right now I was interested in it. I hoped it would go on for a long time, but I wasn't sure.
_No Crime in the Mountains_, Raymond Chandler
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"You hit bad, son?"
The man pressed his left hand against his chest. Blood oozed between his fingers. He lifted his right hand slowly, until the arm was rigid and pointing to the corner of the ceiling. His lips quivered, stiffened, spoke.
"Heil Hitler!" he said thickly.
He fell back and lay motionless. His throat rattled a little and then that, too, was still, and everything in the room was still, even the dog.
"This man must be one of them Nazis," the sheriff said.
_No Crime in the Mountains_, Raymond Chandler
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"Right now I am taking my medicine. I ain't myself without a slight touch of delirium tremens, as the guy says."
_Pearls are a Nuisance_, Raymond Chandler
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"If you want trouble," he said, "I come from where they make it."
_The King in Yellow_, Raymond Chandler
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"Talk it up, copper. My mind reader just quit."
_I'll be Waiting_, Raymond Chandler
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"You can make a lot of mistakes in just one lifetime."
_I'll be Waiting_, Raymond Chandler
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The girl gave him a look which should have stuck at least four inches out of his back.
-- _The Long Goodbye_, Raymond Chandler
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She slid away from him but her voice slid away a lot farther than that.
-- _The Long Goodbye_, Raymond Chandler
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I drove back to Hollywood feeling like a short length of chewed string.
-- _The Long Goodbye_, Raymond Chandler
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She hung up and I set out the chess board. I filled a pipe, paraded the chessmen and inspected them for French shaves and loose buttons, and played a championship tournament game between Gortchakoff and Menikin, seventy-two moves to a draw, a prize specimen of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, a battle without armor, a war without blood, and as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency.
-- _The Long Goodbye_, Raymond Chandler
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What a magician is the subconscious. If only it would work regular hours.
-- _The Long Goodbye_, Raymond Chandler
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I was as hollow and as empty as the spaces between stars.
-- _The Long Goodbye_, Raymond Chandler
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"Just thinking about it makes me bleed internally [....]"
-- _The Long Goodbye_, Raymond Chandler
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"You're not big, you're just loud."
-- _The Long Goodbye_, Raymond Chandler
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"The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind."
--H.L. Menken
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We headed along the bottom of a small dry creek towards the jumbled shape of a sprawling stone-and-log-built cabin, which looked like it owed something to Frank Lloyd Wright. Probably an apology.
-- Iain Banks, _The Business_
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Attempting an exact total can become a meaningless numbers game, but it is clear that the [V-2] was a unique weapon: More people died producing it than died from being hit by it. In round numbers, 5,000 people were killed by the 3,200 V-2s that the Germans fired at English and Continental targets. (More V-weapons were launched at Belgium than at Britain, although one would hardly know that from the literature on the topic.) By that measure, at least two-thirds of all Allied victims of the ballistic missile came from the people who produced it, rather than from those who endured its descent.
-- Michael J. Neufeld, _The Rocket and the Reich_
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Government can send us to war, pick our pockets, slap us in jail, run a highway through our garden, look the other way as polluters do their dirty work, take care of the people who are already well cared for at the expense of those who can't afford lawyers, lobbyists or time to be vigilant. It matters who's pulling the strings. It also matters who defines the news and decides what to cover.
-- Bill Moyers
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According to Bob Mehnert, Chief of the NLM Public Information Office, the library was to be a safe haven in the event of an attack on nearby Washington. "The building was designed as a bomb shelter with very few openings and massive concrete walls. For years, emergency medical supplies, food and water were stored inside. In the event of a nuclear attack, the windows at the top of the building were supposed to blow right out. The foot thick concrete dome would land on top of four columns, sealing off the main floor from the outside." The administrative offices, he notes, "were to be immediately sacrificed."
http://www.quirksworld.com/ec-sepoct97.html http://www.nlm.nih.gov/
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"And now," said Sir Henry, "trek." So we started. We had nothing to guide ourselves by except the distant mountains and old Jose' da Silvestra's chart, which, considering that it was drawn by a dying and half distraught man on a fragment of linen three centuries ago, was not a very satisfactory sort of thing to work on.
-- H. Rider Haggard, _King Solomon's Mines_
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"My only stipulation is that he allows me to wear trousers."
-- H. Rider Haggard, _King Solomon's Mines_
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But Good persisted, and once only did the Kukuana people get the chance of seeing his beautiful legs again. Good is a very modest man. Henceforward they had to satisfy their aesthetic longings with one whisker, his transparent eye, and his movable teeth.
-- H. Rider Haggard, _King Solomon's Mines_
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"Bravo, Quartermain!" sang out Good; "you've frightened him." This made me very angry, for if possible to avoid it, I hate to miss in public. When one can only do one thing well, one likes to keep up one's reputation in that thing.
-- H. Rider Haggard, _King Solomon's Mines_
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By a piece of grim humour, he named this axe 'Inkosi-kaas,' which is the Zulu word for chieftainess. For a long while I could not make out why he gave it such a name, and at last I asked him, when he informed me that the axe was evidently feminine, because of her womanly habit of prying very deep into things, and that she was clearly a chieftainess because all men fell down before her, struck dumb at the sight of her beauty and power. In the same way he would consult 'Inkosi-kass' if in any dilemma; and when I asked him why he did so, he informed me it was because she must needs be wise, having 'looked into so many people's brains.'
-- H. Rider Haggard, _King Solomon's Mines_
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"A sharp spear," runs the Kukuana saying, "needs no polish;" and on the same prinicple I venture to hope that a true story, however strange it may be, does not need to be decked out in fine words.
-- "Allan Quatermain" (H. Rider Haggard) _King Solomon's Mines_
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"It is a hard thing that when one has shot sixty-five lions, as I have in the course of my life, that the sixty-sixth should chew your leg like a quid of tobacco. It breaks the routine of the thing, and putting other considerations aside, I am an orderly man and don't like that."
-- "Allan Quatermain" (H. Rider Haggard) _King Solomon's Mines_
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"After spending a week in Cape Town, finding that they overcharged me at the hotel, and having seen everything there was to see, including the botanical gardens, which seem to me likely to confer a great benefit to the country, and the new Houses of Parliament, which I expect will do nothing of the sort...."
-- "Allan Quatermain" (H. Rider Haggard) _King Solomon's Mines_
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"When did ignorance become a point of view?"
-- Dilbert
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"I've had my whole body set on fire and gone through a windshield, I've been hit by cars going thirty miles an hour, jumped from a helicopter on to a moving train in 'Supercop' and off a bridge 90 feet high, driven a moving car that exploded while I was inside, and I jumped from shore onto a speeding boat in 'A Better Tomorrow 2'."
-- Stanley Tong
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The only constant is change. Buddy, can you paradigm?
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"The United States developed quieter and quieter submarines, but they made them so quiet it was quieter than the ambient noise around them," he said. "So the Soviets could search for quiet spots."
-- Tom Hopcroft
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"What kind of scientist would make a robot look like that and instill her with Puritan views?" "An *evil* scientist. Try to keep up here."
-- Sluggy Freelance, http://www.sluggy.com
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"I would probably not call it God-like, but I would probably say ... we are tampering with nature in a very peculiar, very bizarre way,"
-- Lene Vestergaard Hau
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"An informal test for the accuracy of a decipherment is the number of gods in the text."
--Simon Singh, The Code Book
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Approximately 97 percent of the words in Webster's dictionary have been registered as domain names.
(Reuters)
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"Said a girl who upon her divan / Was attacked by a virile young man : 'Such excess of passion / Is quite out of fashion' And she fractured his wrist with her fan"
-- Edward Gorey
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What originally started as a rather feeble but lucky attempt to get on the OO bandwagon, the MFC soon became something you'd like to see Steve McQueen kill.
-- RA Downes
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"Necessary work is continuing, including the use of artillery and missile strikes against the groups of bandits," the Itar-Tass news agency quoted Alexander Mikhailov as saying.
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"How long are you going to keep on licking the boots that kick you?"
"Everybody does his duty at Zinderneuf -- dead or alive!"
-- Beau Geste (1939)
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"Now, take all of your computer's memory and arrange it as one long line of zeros and ones: 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, ...."
-- Gary Flake, _The Computational Beauty of Nature_
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The fact that no one understands you doesn't mean you're an artist.
-- MacEddie
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"With so many innocent children already dead, it's critical that we wait not a minute longer to enact knee-jerk legislation."
-- The Onion, 5/5/1999
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"The Internet-2 effort has multicasting in all its routers, reminding us how nice it is to throw away the prototype and then build it correctly the second time."
-- Singhal and Zyda, _Networked Virtual Environments_
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"It would be harder to come up with a dumber idea for a Monopoly game without adding a deadly contact poison."
http://www.brunching.com
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"Fruit drinks that require you disarm the poison needle hidden in the lid rarely sell well."
http://www.brunching.com
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7. All I did was torture hundreds of innocent people, wipe out an entire generation of Jedi Knights, assist in destroying the rightful government in exchange for a malevolent dictatorship, destroy a planet, torture my daughter that I didn't even know existed, chop off my son's hand and I'm the bad guy.
--Charles Lillie, "Darth Vader's Top Ten Pet Peeves"
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"Admit it -- in the U.S. and Europe, we view the latest screenshots from Japanese development houses with awe and mounting dread as we realize the eyebrows on our main characters don't comprise individual hairs."
-- Peter Molyneux, "Game Developer" magazine
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"One may cower within, but one cannot avoid, -- *le Bec de la Mort*, the...'Beak of Death.'"
_Mason & Dixon_, by Thomas Pynchon
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"Obviously, the president has never been captured by super-intelligent apes, or he'd feel differently about the importance of guns."
http://www.theonion.com/onion3610/wdyt_3610.html
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"Those who lack courage should not randomly enter the theater."
-- Lai Ka Man, Duen Ming Wai
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"The whole idea of sexy Chinese girls wearing tight superhero type costumes, fighting and then having sex, is possibly the finest development in the hundred years of cinema history a man could possibly hope for."
-- Jonathan Ross
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Onion Head Monster crushes the Ant People like ants!
-- http://www.onionheadmonster.com
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LM: "We're the Mobster Lobsters" "From Las Vegas" OHM: "Tonight you sleep with the 99 cent shrimp!"
-- http://www.onionheadmonster.com
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Tommy Monaghan: Ooeeooeeoo... Natt the Hat: Wah, wah, wah...
-- Hitman [Comic]
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'Do not try and bend the spoon, that's impossible. Instead, try and realize the truth.' "The truth?" 'The spoon effect will be added later using some sort of SGI workstation.'
-- http://www.detonate.net
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Cold Comfort http://www.reason.com/0001/fe.js.cold.html
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"When we're not chasing rock-throwing pirates...we're negotiating with executives of mega-corporations in Europe, the United States, and Japan." -- on some junk mail I received
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The only recourse, then, is to design for the worst-case scenario, add a fudge factor, and hope for the best. With any luck, the ... design will be obsolete before the worst-case scenario actually happens!
--S. Keshav, _An Engineering Approach to Computer Networking_
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"Whose finger do you want on the ALT-CONTROL-DELETE button?"
-- Al Gore, "My Visit to Microsoft"
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"It wouldn't be worth much to stop people from aging if you turned them into a big ball of tumor."
-- Dr. Jack Griffith
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It was our idea to visualize this view of the new kind of dictator, because we grow up in a condition of dictatorship - Lenin, Stalin, etc. And when we came to United States, we recognized that another dictator here is the so-called majority.
-- Vitaly Komar (and Alexander Melamid)
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"Each paragraph introduces a new word into the English language."
-- Dennis J Bouvier, "Getting Started with the Java 3D API"
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PC Gamer: Are you, in fact, the baddest mofo in film? Bruce Campbell: Yes, but only in film. I don't want to confuse the issue, or get guys coming after me. But in film, yes.
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"As with a class with too many instance variables, a class with too much code is prime breeding ground for duplicated code, chaos, and death."
-- Martin Fowler and Kent Beck, _Refactoring_
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http://www.stevebarr.com <- Now only 19 links from everything else! Less addictive than crack, more fun than incarceration! Viewable on all iMac colors! 100% new since 1994!
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"Now, here's a useful tool--.470, telescopic sight, double ejector, point-blank up to three-fifty. That's the rifle I used against the Peruvian slave-drivers three years ago. I was the flail of the Lord up in those parts, I may tell you, though you won't find it in any Blue-book. There are times, young fellah, when every one of us must make a stand for human right and justice, or you never feel clean again. That's why I made a little war on my own. Declared it myself, waged it myself, ended it myself. Each of those nicks is for a slave murderer--a good row of them--what? That big one is for Pedro Lopez, the king of them all, that I killed in a backwater of the Putomayo River."
Pg. 55, _The Lost World_ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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Roark got up, he took a long ruler from the desk, he walked to the picture. "Shall I tell you what's rotten about it?"
"It's the Parthenon!" said the Dean.
"Yes, God damn it, the Parthenon!"
The ruler struck the glass over the picture.
"Look," said Roark. "The famous flutings on the famous columns -- what are they there for? To hide the joints in wood -- when columns were made of wood, only these aren't, they're marble. The triglyphs, what are they? Wood. Wooden beams, the way they had to be laid when people began to build wooden shacks. Your Greeks took marble and they made copies of their wooden structures out of it, because others had done it that way. Then your masters of the Renaissance came along and made copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Now here we are, making copies in steel and concrete of copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood.
Pgs. 23-24, _The Fountainhead_, Ayn Rand
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"Every man creates his meaning and form and goal. Why is it so important -- what others have done? Why does it become sacred by the mere fact of not being your own? Why is anyone and everyone right -- so long as it's not yourself? Why does the number of those others take the place of truth? Why is truth made a mere matter of arithmetic -- and only of addition at that? Why is everything twisted out of all sense to fit everything else?"
Pg. 24, _The Fountainhead_, Ayn Rand
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"What do you want? Perfection?"
"-- or nothing. So, you see, I take the nothing."
Pg. 144, _The Fountainhead_, Ayn Rand
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He got up, walked over to her, and stood looking at the lights of the city below them, at the angular shapes of buildings, at the dark walls made translucent by the glow of the windows, as if the walls were only a checkered veil of thin black gauze over a solid mass of radiance. And Ellsworth Toohey said softly:
"Look at it. A sublime achievement, isn't it? A heroic achievement. Think of the thousands who worked to create this and of the millions who profit by it. And it is said that but for the spirit of a dozen men, here and there down the ages, but for a dozen men -- less, perhaps -- none of this would have been possible. And that might be true. If so, there are -- again -- two possible attitudes to take. We can say that these twelve were great benefactors, that we are all fed by the overflow of the magnificent wealth of their spirit, and that we are glad to accept it in gratitude and brotherhood. Or we can say that by the splendor of their achievement which we can neither equal nor keep, these twelve have shown us what we are, that we do not want the free gifts of their grandeur, that a cave by an oozing swamp and a fire of sticks rubbed together are preferable to skyscrapers and neon lights -- if the cave and the sticks are the limit of your own creative capacities. Of the two attitudes, Dominique, which would you call the truly humanitarian one? Because, you see, I'm a humanitarian."
Pg. 281, _The Fountainhead_, Ayn Rand
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"We are all brothers under the skin -- and I, for one, would be willing to skin humanity to prove it."
Pg. 305, Ellsworth Toohey in _The Fountainhead_, Ayn Rand
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"But I believe I made it clear that I am in favor of it, because I am in favor of a free economy. A free economy cannot exist without competition. Therefore, men must be forced to compete. Therefore, we must control men in order to force them to be free."
pg. 127 _Atlas Shrugged_, Ayn Rand
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"People said it because other people said it. They did not know why it was being said and heard everywhere. They did not give or ask for reasons."
pg. 214 _Atlas Shrugged_, Ayn Rand
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"Do you really think that we want those laws to be observed?" said Dr. Ferris. We *want* them broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against-- then you'll know that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We're after power and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know real trick, and you'd better get wise to 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 nor objectively interpreted--and you create a nation of law-breakers--and then you cash in on guilt."
pg. 406 _Atlas Shrugged_, Ayn Rand
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"I believe that you have an old-fashioned idea about law, Miss Taggart. Why speak of rigid, unbreakable laws? Our modern laws are elastic and open to interpretation according to... circumstances."
pg. 583 _Atlas Shrugged_, Ayn Rand
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'*There*, she thought was the ultimate goal of all that loose academic prattle which businessmen had ignored over the years, the goal of all the slipshod definitions, the sloppy generalities, the soupy abstractions, all claiming that obedience to objective reality is the same as obedience to the State, that there is no difference between a law of nature and a bureaucrat's directive, that a hungry man is not free, that man must be released from the tyranny of food, shelter and clothing--all of it, for years, that the day might come when Nat Taggart, the realist, would be asked to consider the will of Cuffy Meigs as a *fact* of nature, irrevocable and absolute like steel, rails and gravitation, to accept the Meigs made world as objective, unchangeable reality-- then to continue producing abundance in that world. *There* was the goal of all those con men of library and classroom, who sold their revelations as reason, their "instincts" as science, their cravings as knowledge, the goal of all the savages of the non-objective, the non-absolute, the relative, the tenative, the probable--the savages who, seeing a farmer gather a harvest, can consider it only as a mystic phenomenon unbounded by the law of causality and created by the farmer's omnipotent whim, who then proceed to seize the farmer, to chain him, to deprive him of tools, of seeds, of water, of soil, to push him out on a barren rock and to command: "*Now* grow a harvest and feed us!"'
pg. 843 _Atlas Shrugged_, Ayn Rand
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"She had set out to break him, as if, unable to equal his value, she could surpass it by destroying it, as if the measure of his greatness would thus become the measure of hers, as if -- he thought with a shudder -- as if the vandal who smashed a statue were greater than the artist who had made it, as if the murderer who killed a child were greater than the mother who had given it birth."
pg. 896 _Atlas Shrugged_, Ayn Rand
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"Man's mind is the basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action. He cannot obtain his food without a knowledge of food and of the way to obtain it. He cannot dig a ditch -- or build a cyclotron -- without a knowledge of his aim and of the means to achieve it. To remain alive, he must think."
pg. 930 _Atlas Shrugged_, Ayn Rand
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"Whatever may be open to disagreement, there is one act of evil that may not, the act that no man may commit against others and no man may sanction or forgive. So long as men desire to live together, no man may *initiate* -- do you hear me? no man may *start* -- the use of physical force against others."
pg. 940 _Atlas Shrugged_, Ayn Rand
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"I do not grant the terms of reason to men who deprive me of reason. I do not enter discussions with neighbors who think they can forbid me to think. I do not place my moral sanction upon a murderer's wish to kill me. When a man attempts to deal with me by force, I answer him -- by force.
"It is only in retaliation that force may be used and only against the man who starts its use. No, I do not share his evil or sink to his concept of morality: I merely grant him his choice, destruction, the only destruction he had the right to choose: his own. He uses force to seize a value; I use it only to destroy destruction. A holdup man seeks to gain wealth by killing me; I do not grow richer by killing a holdup man. I seek no values by means of evil, no to I surrender my values to evil."
pg. 941 _Atlas Shrugged_, Ayn Rand
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"When you work in a modern factory, you are paid, not only for your labor, but for all the productive genius which has made that factory possible: for the work of the industrialist who built it, for the work of the investor who saved the money to risk on the untried and the new, for the work of the engineer who designed the machines which you are pushing the levers, for the work of the inventor who created the product which you spend your time on making, for the work of the scientist who discovered the laws that went into the making of the product, for the work of the philosopher who taught men how to think and whom you spend your time denouncing."
pg. 979 _Atlas Shrugged_, Ayn Rand
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