Objectivist Quotes & Sayings

Don't you see, Doctor?" said Lasher. "The machines are to practically everbody what the white men were to the Indians. People are finding that, because of the way the machines are changing the world, more and more of their old values don't apply any more. People have no choice but to become second-rate machines themselves, or wards of the machines. — Kurt Vonnegut

Never have I subscribed to the doctrine of willful rejection of the world or its visual image. To the non-objectivist this act of impiety may be shockingly impure, but God, I have no desire to be either hollow or sterile. — Norman Mailer

In absolute incommunicableness it stood apart, a thought, a system of thought which as yet had no symbol in spoken language — Fitz Hugh Ludlow

No scientist knows the world merely by holding it at arm's length: if we ever managed to build the objectivist wall between the knower and the known, we could know nothing except the wall itself. Science requires an engagement with the world, a live encounter between the knower and the known. That encounter has moments of distance, but it would not be an encounter without moments of intimacy as well. Knowing of any sort is relational, animated by a desire to come into deeper community with what we know. — Parker J. Palmer

tired, wore a long-sleeved white shirt, its cuffs rolled up to his elbows, and khakis, both starched but well wrinkled. A wide-brimmed floppy canvas hat shielded his pale face and scalp from the sun. Roosevelt held up his glass in the direction of Mount Vernon, now visible on the southern bank. "A toast to our first commander in chief," the present commander in chief announced, "and spymaster. I trust you're aware that George Washington set up the Continental Army's first — William E. Butterworth IV

Money is the barometer of society's virtue. — Ayn Rand

Every honest man lives for himself. Every man worth calling a man lives for himself. The one who doesn't - doesn't live at all. — Ayn Rand

The sexual act is in time what the tiger is in space. — Georges Bataille

Discombobulated. — Dannika Dark

Early economic theory was rooted in the Italian, French, and Spanish traditions, which were subjectivist oriented. Then it shifted onto the terrible path by Smith and Ricardo and the British classical tradition, which is 'objectivist' - values are in inherent in production. — Murray Rothbard

Ease is something that I think many admire in other people, in sports or whatever it may be. — Peter Riegert

For instance, Objectivists will often hear a question such as: "What will be done about the poor or the handicapped in a free society?" The altruist-collectivist premise, implicit in that question, is that men are "their brothers' keepers" and that the misfortune of some is a mortgage on others. The questioner is ignoring or evading the basic premises of Objectivist ethics and is attempting to switch the discussion onto his own collectivist base. Observe that he does not ask: "Should anything be done?" but: "What will be done?" - as if the collectivist premise had been tacitly accepted and all that remains is a discussion of the means to implement it. Once, when Barbara Branden was asked by a student: "What will happen to the poor in an Objectivist society?" - she answered: "If you want to help them, you will not be stopped. — Anonymous

In life, everybody faces choices between doing what's popular, easy, and wrong vs. doing what's lonely, difficult, and right. These decisions intensify when you run a company, because the consequences get magnified 1,000 fold. As in life, the excuses for CEOs making the wrong choice are always plentiful. — Ben Horowitz

Theodore Finch - I was alive.I burned brightly.And then I died,but not really.Because someone like me cannot,will not,die like everyone else.I linger like the legends of the Blue Hole.I will always be here,in the offerings and people I left behind. — Jennifer Niven

A problem is only a problem when viewed as a problem. All change is hard at first, messy in the middle and gorgeous at the end. — Robin Sharma

The subjectivist states his judgements, whereas the objectivist sweeps them under the carpet by calling assumptions knowledge, and he basks in the glorious objectivity of science. — I. J. Good

The social world is thus liable to two seemingly antinomic readings: a 'structuralist' one that seeks out invisible relational patterns operating behind the backs of agents and a 'constructivist' one that probes the ordinary perceptions and actions of the individual. Bourdieu contends that the opposition between these two approaches is artificial and mutilating. For 'the two moments, objectivist and subjectivist, stand in dialectical relationship'. — Loic Wacquant

The heart of the objectivist tradition in philosophy comes directly out of the myth of objectivism: the world is made up of distinct objects, with inherent properties and fixed relations among them at any instant. We argue, on the basis of linguistic evidence (especially metaphor), that the objectivist philosophy fails to account for the way we understand our experience, our thoughts, and our language. An — George Lakoff

And what of this new book the whole world makes such a rout about?
Oh ! 'tis out of all plumb, my lord,
quite an irregular thing! — Laurence Sterne

In every circumstance, all my life, my mind shows me the possible bad outcome: someone walks down steps, and before I can do anything to head the image off, I see a fall, a catastrophe. — Richard Bausch

If you agree with some tenets of Objectivism, but disagree with others, do not call yourself an Objectivist; give proper authorship credit for the parts you agree with — Ayn Rand

When Hume insists that taste is a matter of delicacy, that it is a matter of having a sensitivity to features of an object itself, he is very close to the rationalist doctrine. Hume was really a covert objectivist (or partial one) about aesthetic pleasure because that pleasure had to be based on the sensitivity to features in the object. — Frederick C. Beiser