Frederick Sterling > Frederick's Quotes

“I'm just delighted to be living, to be able to have a simple conversation, to feel a ray of sunlight on my skin and listen to the breeze move through the leaves of a tree.”
― Ryuichi Sakamoto

“The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.”
― Ayn Rand

“We are not the admirers of the “ideal man” of “social rights, but the proclaimers of the “actual individual”, enemy of social abstractions.

We fight for the liberation of the individual.

For the conquest of life.

For the triumph of our idea.

For the realization of our dreams.

And if our ideas are dangerous, it is because we are those who love to live dangerously.

And if our dreams are mad, it is because we are mad. But our madness is supreme wisdom.”
― Renzo Novatore, The Collected Writings of Renzo Novatore

“All rational action is economic. All economic activity is rational action. All rational action is in the first place individual action. Only the individual thinks. Only the individual reasons. Only the individual acts.”
― Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis

“What makes Bolshevism strong is not the Soviets' artillery and machine-guns but the fact that the whole world receives its ideas sympathetically.”
― Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis

“When we call a capitalist society a consumers' democracy we mean that the power to dispose of the means of production, which belongs to the entrepreneurs and capitalists, can only be acquired by means of the consumers' ballot, held daily in the market-place.”
― Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis

“Liberalism has no admiration to spare for the heroic grandiosity of Marxism's professional revolutionaries, who stake the lives of thousands and destroy values which the labour of decades and centuries has created. Here the economic principle holds good: Liberalism wants success at the smallest price.”
― Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis

“The nationalist, too, affirms Socialism, and objects only to its Internationalism. He wishes to combine Socialism with the ideas of Imperialism and the struggle against foreign nations. He is a national, not an international socialist; but he, also, approves of the essential principles of Socialism.”
― Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis

“Under Lenin’s one-party state rule, this took the form of the Yevsektsiya, the Jewish section of the Bolshevik Party, run by—who else?—Jews. It was a perfect solution. The state could ban Judaism and criminalize Zionism, and Lenin could point to the fact of the Jewish section to prove that the Communists were actually philo-Semitic. Jews could join—and persecute other Jews—to prove that they were committed members of the party.”
― Bari Weiss, How to Fight Anti-Semitism

“Under fascism, it is not primarily the power of money which corrupts, but rather does corruption spring from the power of the State. Whereas in democratic countries the businessman may use his money to influence legislation and public opinion and thus operate as a source of power and corruption, in fascist countries he can exist only as the subject upon whom State power operates. The corruption in fascist countries arises inevitably from the reversal of the roles of the capitalist and the State as wielders of economic power.”
― Günter Reimann, The Vampire Economy: Doing Business under Fascism

“I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone.”
― Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism

“My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose.”
― Ayn Rand, Anthem

“Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.”
― Ayn Rand

“The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“Altruism holds that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only moral justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty. The political expression of altruism is collectivism or statism, which holds that man's life and work belong to the state - to society, to the group, the gang, the race, the nation - and that the state may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good.”
― Ayn Rand, The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought