Terry > Terry's Quotes

“The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me.
A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.
We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality
The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.
I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone.
Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.
There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.
Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think.”
― Ayn Rand

“Every period ruled by mystics was an era of stagnation and want, when most men were on strike against existence, working for less than their barest survival, leaving nothing but scraps for their rulers to loot, refusing to think, to venture, to produce, when the ultimate collector of their profits and the final authority on truth or error was the whim of some gilded degenerate sanctioned as superior to reason by divine right and by grace of a club.”
― Ayn Rand

“Don't join the book burners. Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book...”
― Dwight D. Eisenhower

“Time goes forward because energy itself is always moving from an available to an unavailable state. Our consciousness is continually recording the entropy change in the world around us. We watch our friends get old and die. We sit next to a fire and watch it's red-hot embers turn slowly into cold white ashes. We experience the world always changing around us, and that experience is the unfolding of the second law. It is the irreversible process of dissipation of energy in the world. What does it mean to say, 'The world is running out of time'? Simply this: we experience the passage of time by the succession of one event after another. And every time an event occurs anywhere in this world energy is expended and the overall entropy is increased. To say the world is running out of time then, to say the world is running out of usable energy. In the words of Sir Arthur Eddington, 'Entropy is time's arrow'.”
― Jeremy Rifkin, Entropy: A New World View

“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything