Quotes About Philosophy

It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment—on the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the verdict 'It is.

In a system of full capitalism, there should be (but, historically, has not yet been) a complete separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.

Kant's expressly stated purpose was to save the morality of self-abnegation and self-sacrifice. He knew that it could not survive without a mystic base—and what it had to be saved from was reason.

And now, sitting here in our tunnel, we wonder about these words. It is forbidden, not to be happy.

Desde la necesidad más simple hasta la más alta abstracción religiosa, desde la rueda hasta el rascacielos, todo lo que somos y todo lo que tenemos procede de un solo atributo del hombre: la función de su mente razonadora.

Everything is something...

I'll tell you…I'll tell you something…unhappiness is the hallmark of virtue. If a man is unhappy, really, truly unhappy, it means that he is a superior sort of person.

The power of ideas has no reality for either of them, and neither cares to learn that the proof of that power lies in his own chronic sense of guilt and terror.

Observe also that an honest theoretician does not try to present his ideas in the guise of their opposites. But Kant's philosophy is presented as "pure reason"—altruism is presented as a doctrine of "love"—communism is presented as "liberation"—and egalitarianism is presented as "justice.

Dios es aquello que la mente humana no puede concebir, afirman, y luego os piden que consideréis tal cosa como conocimiento; Dios no es hombre, el cielo no es tierra, el alma no es el cuerpo, la virtud no es provecho, A no es A, la percepción no es sensorial, el conocimiento no es rázon. Sus definiciones no constituyen el acto de definir, sino el de borrar.

There is no such thing as a temporary suicide.

Free scientific inquiry? The first adjective is redundant.

Reason is not automatic. Those that deny it cannot be conquered by it.

Are you beginning to see who is John Galt? I am the man who has earned the thing you didn't fight for.... I am proud of my own value and of the fact that I wish to live.

Cuando un hombre declara: ¿Quién soy yo para saberlo? Lo que declara es esto: ¿Quien soy yo para vivir?

Thought is a primitive superstition. Reason is an irrational idea.

moral absolute one does not

What is it that you're all doing here?" "Living.

The Objectivist ethics, in essence, hold that man exists for his own sake, that the pursuit of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose, that he must not sacrifice himself to others, nor sacrifice others to himself. It is this last that Galt's statement summarizes.

All work is an act of philosophy. And when men will learn to consider productive work—and that which is its source—as the standard of their moral values, they will reach that state of perfection which is the birthright they lost..

there have been centuries of philosophers plotting to turn the world into just that—to destroy people's minds by making them believe that that's what they're seeing. But you don't have to accept it. You don't have to see through the eyes of others, hold on to yours, stand on your own judgment, you know that what is, is—say it aloud, like the holiest of prayers, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

Cuál es entonces su norma de conocimiento y de verdad? Lo que otros crean, responden. enseñan que no hay conocimiento, sino fe.

The men who now sat in front of his desk had been taught that the law of causality was a superstition and that one had to deal with the situation of the moment without considering its cause.

I can't live a life torn between that which exists—and you.