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When I disagree with a rational man. I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit

Nobody has the 'right' to clog the streets.... and cause dreadful traffic snarls, in order to display their views, to attract attention, to register a protest.

The societies that have perpetuated the worst crimes against humanity have been censorship and propaganda states. Long live free speech.

The right to self-defense is an unconditional right, not a permission doled out only under comfortable conditions. [Your] right to life … is not compromised by the fact that someone threatening to kill you has also taken a hostage who might be hurt.

I believe that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an explanation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious ad hoc magic.

Instead of looking upon discussion as a stumbling-block in the way of action, we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all.

Centuries of chains and lashes will not kill the spirit of man nor the sense of truth within man.

The notion that we cannot be friends with, work with...people with whom we have deep disagreements on certain issues...is harmful to the social fabric in general and to social movements in particular.

The man who speaks to you if sacrifice speaks of slaves and masters. and intends to be master.

A new campaign is being sneaked up on us, softly, tentatively, but insistently: a campaign to load us with the responsibility of feeding the whole world.

Do not give up the freedom of the press and every other form of presenting ideas. So long as that's free, a peaceful intellectual turn is possible.

The man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.

The concept of individual rights is so new in human history that most men have not grasped it fully to this day. . . . Some men assert that rights are a gift of God—others, that rights are a gift of society. But, in fact, the source of rights is man's nature.

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.

Free speech isn't free speech, until the last Nazi has had the right to speak free speech.

The concept of individual rights is so new in human history that most men have not grasped it fully to this day. [S]ome men assert that rights are a gift of God—others, that rights are a gift of society. But, in fact, the source of rights is man’s nature.

The concept of individual rights is so new in human history that most men have not grasped it fully to this day. . . . Some men assert that rights are a gift of God—others, that rights are a gift of society. But, in fact, the source of rights is man's nature.

The inductivist or Lamarckian approach operates with the idea of instruction from without, or from the environment. But the critical or Darwinian approach only allows instruction from within – from within the structure itself… I contend that there is no such thing as instruction from without the structure. We do not discover new facts or new effects by copying them, or by inferring them inductively from observation, or by any other method of instruction by the environment. We use, rather, the method of trial and the elimination of error. As Ernst Gombrich says, ‘making comes before matching’: the active production of a new trial structure comes before its exposure to eliminating tests.

1) Creativity is necessary and sufficient for consciousness/sentience to arise. 2) Animals are not creative. 3) Therefore, animals are not sentient.

The possibilities that lie in the future are infinite. When I say ‘It is our duty to remain optimists,’ this includes not only the openness of the future but also that which all of us contribute to it by everything we do: we are all responsible for what the future holds in store. Thus it is our duty, not to prophesy evil but, rather, to fight for a better world.

An embryo has no rights. Rights do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being. A child cannot acquire any rights until it is born. The living take precedence over the not yet living (or the unborn). Abortion is a moral right — which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved; morally, nothing other than her wish in the matter is to be considered.

Any free nation had the right to invade Nazi Germany and, today, has the right to invade Soviet Russia, Cuba or any other slave pen. Whether a free nation chooses to do so or not is a matter of its own self-interest.

An embryo has no rights. Rights do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being. A child cannot acquire any rights until it is born. The living take precedence over the not-yet-living (or the unborn). Abortion is a moral right.

“There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromiser is the transmitting rubber tube. “You, who are half-rational, half-coward, have been playing a con game with reality, but the victim you have conned is yourself. When men reduce their virtues to the approximate, then evil acquires the force of an absolute, when loyalty to an unyielding purpose is dropped by the virtuous, it’s picked up by scoundrels—and you get the indecent spectacle of a cringing, bargaining, traitorous good and a self-righteously uncompromising evil.

There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromiser is the transmitting rubber tube . . . When men reduce their virtues to the approximate, then evil acquires the force of an absolute, when loyalty to an unyielding purpose is dropped by the virtuous, it’s picked up by scoundrels—and you get the indecent spectacle of a cringing, bargaining, traitorous good and a self-righteously uncompromising evil.