Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.
Aristotle, "Nichomachean Ethics"
Thoughtful Quotes From The Past
Allan Bloom
"The United States is one of the highest and most extreme achievements of the rational quest for the good life according to nature. What makes its political structure possible is the use of the rational principles of natural right to found a people, thus uniting the good with its own"
Alexis de Toqueville
"...Has man always inhabited a world like the present. where all things are not in their proper relationships, where virtue is without genius, and genius without honor; where love of order is confused with a taste for oppression, and the holy cult of freedom with a contempt of law; where the light thrown by conscience on human actions is dim, and where nothing seems to be any longer forbidden, or allowed honorable or shameful, false or true?"
George Orwell
"So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot."
Thomas Sowell
"What socialism, fascism and other ideologies of the left have in common is an assumption that some very wise people—like themselves—need to take decisions out of the hands of lesser people, like the rest of us, and impose those decisions by government fiat."
Ayn Rand
“Man needs knowledge in order to survive, and only reason can achieve it; men who reject the responsibility of thought and reason are merely parasites on the thinking of others.”
Voltaire
“Cherish those who seek the truth but beware of those who claim to have found it."
William F. Buckley Jr.
"I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University."
Bertrand Russell
"The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good grounds exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holder's lack of rational conviction."
John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton–First Baron Acton of Aldenham.
"Liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought."
Desiderius Erasmus
"The less talent they have, the more pride, vanity and arrogance they have. All these fools, however, find other fools to applaud them."
Salman Rushdie
"Nobody has the right to not be offended, That right doesn't exist any declaration I have ever read."
Alfonso Bedoya
“Badges? We don't don't have no badges, we don't need no stinkin' badges!” from The Treasure of Sierra Madre, John Huston, Director