Mike Ruff > Mike's Quotes

“Tell me what a person finds sexually attractive and I will tell you their entire philosophy of life. Show me the person they sleep with and I will tell you their valuation of themselves.”
― Ayn Rand

“Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men’s stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade—with reason, not force, as their final arbiter—it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability—and the degree of a man’s productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“The man who is convinced of his own worthlessness will be drawn to a woman he despises—because she will reflect his own secret self, she will release him from that objective reality in which he is a fraud, she will give him a momentary illusion of his own value and a momentary escape from the moral code that damns him.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“The man who despises himself tries to gain self-esteem from sexual adventures —which can’t be done, because sex is not the cause, but an effect and an expression of a man’s sense of his own value.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Observe the ugly mess which most men make of their sex lives—and observe the mess of contradictions which they hold as their moral philosophy.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss—the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery—that you must offer them values, not wounds—that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants: money will not give him a code of values, if he’s evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he’s evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Accepting a man’s hospitality is a token of good will, a declaration that you and your host stand on terms of a civilized relationship.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, "Who is destroying the world?" You are.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“It’s the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money—and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Do I strike you as a man with a miserable inferiority complex?”
“Good God, no!”
“Only that kind of man spends his life running after women.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth—the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money?”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“What do you suppose those women are after but the same thing as the chaser—the desire to gain their own value from the number and fame of the men they conquer? Only it’s one step phonier, because the value they seek is not even in the actual fact, but in the impression on and the envy of other women.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“When a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law, men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims, then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Do you know the hallmark of a second rater? It's resentment of another man's achievement. Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own - they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal - for a mind to respect and an achievement to admire. They bare their teeth at you from out of their rat holes,thinking that you take pleasure in letting your brilliance dim them - while you'd give a year of my life to see a flicker of talent anywhere among them. They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear. They have no way of knowing what he feels when surrounded by inferiors - hatred? no, not hatred, but boredom - the terrible, hopeless, draining, paralyzing boredom. Of what account are praise and adulation from men whom you don't respect? Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?"
"I've felt it all my life," she said.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Your fear of death is not a love for life. . .”
― Ayn Rand

“To fear to face an issue to believe that the worst is true.

--Atlas Shrugged”
― Ayn Rand

“An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.”
― Ayn Rand

“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.”
― Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

“Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it—that no substitute can do your thinking—that the vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your existence.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“To Serve and Protect..."- Traditional Motto of Protection Rackets”
― Robert Lynn Asprin, M.Y.T.H. Inc. in Action

“C'mon kid. Think a minute, even if it hurts.”
― Robert Lynn Asprin, Another Fine Myth

“Now that we've got the whole story," he said solemnly, "now you can panic.”
― Robert Lynn Asprin, Myth Conceptions

“My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“Not to know what happened before one was born is always to be a child. Cicero”
― Cicero

“Hier stehe Ich, Ich kann nicht anders."
("Here I stand, I can do no other")”
― Martin Luther