randomthoughts3

Oct 23, 2001

There is one thing that ought to be taught in all colleges,
Which is that people ought to e taught not to go around always making apologies.
I don't mean the kind of apologies people make when they run over you or borrow five dollars or step on your feet,
Because i think that is sort of sweet;
No, I object to one kind of apology alone,
Which is when people spend their time and yours apologizing for everything they own.

You go to their house for a meal,
And they apologize because the anchovies aren't caviar or the partridge is veal;
They apologize privately for the crudeness of the other guests,
And they apologize publicly for their wife's housekeeping or their husband's jests;

If they give you a book by Dickens they apologize because it isn't by Scott,
And if they take you to the theatre, they apologize for the acting and the dialogue and the plot;
They contain more milk of human kindness than the most capacious dairy can,
But if you're from out of town they apologize for everything local and if you are a foreigner they apologize for everything Americain.

I dread these apologizers even as I am depicting them,
I shudder as I think of the hours that must be spent contradicting them,
Beacause you are very rude if you let them emerge from an argument victorious,
And when they say something of theirs is awful, it is your duty to convince them politely that it is magnificent and glorious,

And what particularly bores me with them,
Is that half the time you have to politely contradict them when you rudely agree with them,
So I think there is one rule every host and hostess ought to keep with the comb and nail file and aromatic spirits on a handy shelf,
Which is don't spoil the denouncement by telling the guests everything is terrible, but let them have the thrill of finding it out for themselves.

- Ogden Nash

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Oct 24, 2001

Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much...the wheel, New York, wars, and so on, whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time.

But conversely the dolphins believed themselves to be more intelligent than man for precisely the same reasons.

- Douglas Adams (from the original radioplay of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

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Oct 25, 2001

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper but minds alive on my shelves.

Men have been taught that it is a virtue to agree with others,
.... But the creator is the man who disagrees.

Men have been taught that it is a virtue to swim with the current
.....But the creator is the man who goes against the current.

Men have been taught that it is a virtue to stand together
...But the creator is the man who stands alone.

- Ayn Rand (from Atlas Shrugged)

We are often told that love (like the pursuit of truth) is selfless. A "selfless love" would be one unrelated to the lover's own life, judgement, or happiness;

such a thing defies the very nature of love. A 'selfless', 'disinterested' love is a contradiction in terms: it means that one is indifferent to that which one values.

The egoist is not a man incapable of love, he is the only one capable of it,

To say "I Love you" as Howard Roark observes (in Fountainhead) "one must first know how to
say the I".

- Leonard Peikoffs Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand

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