Evil thinks not to beguile us by unveiling the terrible truth of its festering intent, but comes, instead, disguised in the diaphanous robes of a virtue, whispering sweet-sounding lies intended to seduce us into the dark bed of our eternal graves.
Life is the future, not the past. The past can teach us, through experience, how to accomplish things in the future, comfort us with cherished memories, and provide the foundation of what has already been accomplished. But only the future holds life. To live in the past is to embrace what is dead. To live life to its fullest, each day must be created anew. As rational thinking beings, we must use intellect, not a blind devotion to what has come before, to make rational choices.
You don’t have any idea what love really is. You can’t love anyone or anything until you love your own existence, first. Love can grow out of a request for your own life. When you love yourself, your own existence, then you love someone who can enhance your existence, share it with you, make it more pleasurable. When you hate yourself and believe your existence is evil, then you can only hate, you can only experience the shell of love, that longing for something good, but you have nothing to base it in but hatred.
Charity, if you have the means, is a personal choice, but charity which is expected or compelled is simply a polite word for slavery.
Reason is a choice. Wishes and whims are not facts, nor are they a means to discovering them. Reason is our only way of grasping reality; it is our basic tool of survival. 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.
Overreacting could sometimes cause as much trouble as doing nothing.
Every person’s life is theirs by right. An individual’s life can and must belong only to himself, not to any society or community, or he is then but a slave. No one can deny another person their right to their life, nor seize by force what is produced by someone else, because that is stealing the means to sustain their life. It is treason against mankind to hold a knife to a man’s throat and dictate how he must live his life. No society can be more important than the individuals that compose it, or else you ascribe supreme importance, not to man, but to any notion that strikes the fancy of that society, at a never-ending cost of lives. Reason and reality are the only means to just laws; mindless wishes, if given sovereignty, become deadly masters.
Life is precious. That’s why sacrifice for freedom is rational: it is for life itself and your ability to live it that you act, since life without freedom is the slow, sure death of self-sacrifice to the good of mankind-who is always someone else. Mankind is just a collection of individuals. Why should everyone’s life be more important, more precious, more valuable than yours? Mindless mandatory self-sacrifice is insane.
Nothing marks a man’s character better than his attraction to intelligence.
People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it’s true, or because they are afraid it might be true. People’s heads are full of knowledge, facts, and beliefs, and most of it is false, yet they think it true. People are stupid; they can only rarely tell the difference between a lie and the truth, and yet they are confident they can, and so are all the easier to fool?