Cooper Mangels

“When facing society, the man most concerned, the man who is to do the most and contribute the most, has the least say. It’s taken for granted that he has no voice and the reasons he could offer are rejected in advance as prejudiced -- since no speech is ever considered, but only the speaker. It’s so much easier to pass judgement on a man than on an idea. Though how in hell one passes judgement on a man without considering the content of his brain is more than I’ll ever understand. However, that’s how it’s done. You see, reasons require scales to weigh them. And scales are not made of cotton. And cotton is what the human spirit is made of -- you know, the stuff that keeps no shape and offers no resistance and can be twisted forward and backward and into a pretzel.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“He applies forgiveness to all humankind for all time. How? Why is this death, this blood, this forgiveness universal? I suspect it is because the blood shed is the blood of God, who is himself universal, an eternal storehouse of mercy. This God who is universal love empties himself and pours eternal life into the cosmos through the wounds of that first century Jewish Rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth.”
― Bradley Jersak, A More Christlike God: A More Beautiful Gospel

“Anything willingly done is done toward an end and anything done toward an end is defined by that end.”
― David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation

“No man likes to be beaten. But to be beaten by the man who has always stood as the particular example of mediocrity in his eyes, to start by the side of this mediocrity and to watch it shoot up, while he struggles and gets nothing but a boot in his face, to see the mediocrity snatch from him, one after another, the chances he’d give his life for, to see the mediocrity worshiped, to miss the place he wants and to see the mediocrity enshrined upon it, to lose, to be sacrificed, not by a god, but by a Peter Keating -- well, my little amateur, do you think the Spanish Inquisition ever thought of a torture to equal this?”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead