Quotes about Philosophy

No, you do not have to live; it is your basic act of choice; but if you choose to live, you must live as a man—by the work and the judgment of your mind.

The integrated sum of a man's basic values is his sense of life.

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.

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.

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.

When all of Europe put into practice the ideas which he had preached, he came to live in America.

Every political system is based on some code of ethics.

I can say—not as a patriotic bromide, but with full knowledge of the necessary metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, political and esthetic roots—that the United States of America is the greatest, the noblest and, in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world. | ~~Ayn Rand "Philosophy: Who Needs It, 10

God is non-man, heaven is non-earth, soul is non-body, virtue is non-profit. A is non-A, perception is non-sensory, knowledge is non-reason. Their definitions are not acts of defining, but of wiping out.

He was seeing a long line of men stretched through the centuries from Plato onward, whose heir and final product was an incompetent little professor with the appearance of a gigolo and the soul of a thug.

I'm an old-fashioned guy. I believe in the Enlightenment, and reason, and logic, and you know, facts.

I'm always looking at the dialectic between the truth we believe exists outside ourselves and the truth we invent for ourselves.