Atheism Activists

"I believe that women are human beings. What is proper for a man is proper for a woman. The basic principles are the same. I would not attempt to prescribe what kind of work a man should do, and I would not attempt it in regard to women. There is no particular work, which is specifically feminine. Women can choose their work according to their own purpose and premises in the same manner as men do."

"Love is not self-sacrifice, but the most profound assertion of your own needs and values. It is for your own happiness that you need the person you love, and that is the greatest compliment, the greatest tribute you can pay to that person."

"A central purpose serves to integrate all the other concerns of a man’s life. It establishes the hierarchy, the relative importance, of his values, it saves him from pointless inner conflicts, it permits him to enjoy life on a wide scale and to carry that enjoyment into any area open to his mind; whereas a man without a purpose is lost in chaos. He does not know what his values are. He does not know how to judge. He cannot tell what is or is not important to him, and, therefore, he drifts helplessly at the mercy of any chance stimulus or any whim of the moment. He can enjoy nothing. He spends his life searching for some value, which he will never find."

"Faith, as such, is extremely detrimental to human life: it is the negation of reason. But you must remember that religion is an early form of philosophy, that the first attempts to explain the universe, to give a coherent frame of reference to man’s life and a code of moral values, were made by religion, before men graduated or developed enough to have philosophy. And, as philosophies, some religions have very valuable moral points. They may have a good influence or proper principles to inculcate, but in a very contradictory context and, on a very – how should I say it? – dangerous or malevolent base: on the ground of faith."

"I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows."

"Objectivism is a philosophical movement; since politics is a branch of philosophy, Objectivism advocates certain political principles — specifically, those of laissez-faire capitalism — as the consequence and the ultimate practical application of its fundamental philosophical principles. It does not regard politics as a separate or primary goal, that is: as a goal that can be achieved without a wider ideological context. . . . Objectivists are not "conservatives." We are radicals for capitalism; we are fighting for that philosophical base which capitalism did not have and without which it was doomed to perish."

"My views on charity are very simple. I do not consider it a major virtue and, above all, I do not consider it a moral duty. There is nothing wrong in helping other people, if and when they are worthy of the help and you can afford to help them. I regard charity as a marginal issue. What I am fighting is the idea that charity is a moral duty and a primary virtue."

"There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism—by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide."

"That particular sense of sacred rapture men say they experience in contemplating nature- I've never received it from nature, only from. Buildings, Skyscrapers. I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pest-hole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window - no, I don't feel how small I am - but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would like to throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body."

"An individualist is a man who says: "I'll not run anyone's life – nor let anyone run mine. I will not rule nor be ruled. I will not be a master nor a slave. I will not sacrifice myself to anyone – nor sacrifice anyone to myself.""

"Something of this implication is fixed in the book's dictatorial tone, which is much its most striking feature. Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal. In addition, the mind which finds this tone natural to it shares other characteristics of its type.1) It consistently mistakes raw force for strength, and the rawer the force, the more reverent the posture of the mind before it. 2) It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable) can only be willfully wicked. There are ways of dealing with such wickedness, and, in fact, right reason itself enjoins them. From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: “To a gas chamber — go!”"

"[On the attendees at the launch of Apollo 11] Those people were not a stampeding herd, nor a manipulated mob; they did not wreck the Florida communities, they did not devastate the countryside, they did not throw themselves, like whining thugs, at the mercy of their victims - they did not create any victims. They came as responsible individuals able to project the reality of two or three days ahead, and to provide for their own needs. There were people of every age, creed, color, educational level and economic status. They lived and slept in tents, or in their cars, some for several days, in great discomfort and unbearable heat; they did it gamely, cheerfully, gaily; they projected a general feeling of confident goodwill, the bond of a common enthusiasm; they created a public spectacle of responsible privacy - and they departed as they had come, without benefit of press agents."

"“Free competition enforced by law” is a grotesque contradiction in terms."

"I regard compassion as proper only toward those who are innocent victims, but not toward those who are morally guilty. If one feels compassion for the victims of a concentration camp, one cannot feel it for the torturers. If one does feel compassion for the torturers, it is an act of moral treason toward the victims."

"Observe, in politics, that the term extremism has become a synonym of "evil," regardless of the content of the issue (the evil is not what you are extreme about, but that you are "extreme"—i.e., consistent)."

"Politically Incorrect was the name of the show Bill Maher hosted in the 1990s. It's also an apt description of the man himself. Now host of ... HBO's hit show Real Time, I find Maher to be one of the sharpest observers of American politics and life in general out there. It doesn't mean I always agree with him. I always find him funny, though."

"Sex is too easy for women to get, and too hard for men. I mean, honestly, for a man to walk into someplace and have every woman ready to take him home, he'd have to rule the world. A woman would have to do her hair."

"I don't fear A.I. anymore because it couldn't possibly be any more robotic than the humans who run things now."

"renewable installations present dramatically lower risks than either fossil fuels or nuclear energy to those who live and work next to them. As comedian Bill Maher once observed, "You know what happens when windmills collapse into the sea? A splash.""

"In San Francisco, the city is so nice you'll step in poop twice, there's an area where homeless people were urinating and defecating and it was starting to annoy the people breaking into cars. So, the city tried to build a public toilet last year but then gave up when the cost hit $1.7 million. Not $1.7 million for a public toilet system, $1.7 million for one toilet… So then a private company took pity on San Francisco and offered to build them their toilet for free. But after, quote… ‘project management, construction management, architecture and engineering fees, permits, civic design review, surveys, contract preparation, and cost estimation’, the free toilet was going to cost almost a million dollars."

"Semafor estimates that if the red tape could be cut on everything that is currently stuck in the renewable queue, the United States would be 80% zero carbon in 7 years. The enemy of clean air isn't just Big Oil, it's Big Permitting. It's not that America isn't able to get anything done, it's that we're not allowed to. Of course, there should be consideration of the environment on everything we build but as so often happens on the left they seem to have no ability to recognize when they've taken a concept way too far and are in fact hurting their own cause."

"As Barack Obama once said, one of the biggest lessons he learned as president is there is no such thing as shovel-ready jobs. Environmental impact statements used to be a few pages long, now they’re thousands of pages of legalistic nonsense and take an average of 4 and a half years to complete with thousands of bureaucrats filling out millions of paper forms that kill hundreds of forests to answer the question is this good for the environment?"

""PC" has almost become a household word. In the 1991 Academy Awards pageant, a commentator joked that Dances with Wolves was "politically correct" (it shows Native Americans as decent and most of the white troops trying to exterminate them as bad guys). Since then, movie critics have sneered at films with anti-racist content, like Follow Me Home or Amistad, for their "PC" essence. The term has even inspired a major television show, Bill Maher's "Politically Incorrect" talkfest. Progressive people use the term without thinking twice about its reactionary function."

"How ironic, with all the talk about the urgency to switching to green energy, our deep state of petty tyrants wasted almost two decades over permitting and nitpicking over the environmental impacts and social effects of the very thing that would most positively impact the environment."

"But the reason why despising Israel became pretty much a requirement of the American left is colleges, elite colleges. The mouth of the river from which this and all manners of radical left illiberal, yes illiberal, nonsense flows. Supporting all-black, that is segregated dorms, segregated graduation ceremonies, and orientation programs, which occur on hundreds of colleges, is illiberal, so is the racism against Asian applicants. And chasing speakers off of campus… there is only one set of acceptable opinions on campus and it is policed hard."

"But there is a deep state, which is the bureaucratic class that justifies its existence by making up new rules and that’s my job. It’s the vast network of regulators, administrators, inspectors, contractor reviewers, project managers, fee accessors, special commissioners, zoning officers, and consultants, whose jobs seem to be to make sure that nothing ever happens and then charge you for it. The people who answer the phone, Permit office. ‘How may I hinder you.’"

"College life today is a day’s spa combined with a North Korean reeducation camp. It’s a daycare center with a meal plan, except the toddlers can fire the adults. The fact that college presidents, who usually love to speak out about anything, couldn’t find their voice to condemn the worst attack since the Holocaust. There is a lot about who really controls colleges and why its ignorance is a disease. Harvard Yard is the Wuhan wet market."

"When my dear brother Bill Maher calls, as he frequently does, I do my best to hop out to L.A. and work with him on Real Time. I revel in his comic brilliance and progressive politics even as I joyfully wrestle with his agnosticism."

"We don't like mystery. You like mystery, 'cause it's not a mystery to you; you know when you're gonna get laid."

"They don’t know much of anything actually, but it doesn’t deter them from having an opinion. They’ve convinced themselves Israel is the most repressive regime in history because they have no knowledge of history or even a desire to know it. And actually, history doesn’t come up in their intersectionality of politics and genderqueer identities class."

"Last year, Wyoming began construction on the largest wind farm in North America that will power 2 million homes in Arizona, Nevada, and California. And to think, it only took 18 years—not to build it, to approve it. Eighteen backlogged, knuckle-dragging, pencil-pushing thumb-twaddling, ball-scratching years to finally get to ‘yes.’ When they started doing the paperwork, Leonardo DiCaprio's girlfriend wasn't even born."

"[About 6 January 2020:] It's not what [Donald Trump] said on that day. It wasn't like he got up there and said 'Go and take over the capital!' – kind of (laughing) totally – it was that up until that moment he still hadn't conceded. It was not one moment. It was like his hole view that he was telling his people."

"You’re like liberals back when they were more reasonable before they became leftists. And now every liberal kind of has to be a leftist. If you want to be on the team, you’ve got to subscribe to the most fringe ideas that the team is promoting. You can be woke, with all the nonsense that that now implies, but don’t say that somehow it’s an extension of liberalism. Because it’s most often actually an undoing of liberalism. You can have your points of view and your positions on these things but don’t try and piggyback on what I always believe. I have always believed, as liberals do for example, in a colorblind society."

"The goal is to not see race at all, anywhere for any reason. That’s what liberals always believed all the way through Obama, going back [to] Kennedy, everybody, Martin Luther King. That’s not what the woke believe. They believe race is first and foremost the thing you should always see everywhere, which I find interesting because that used to be the position of the Ku Klux Klan. Again, you can have that position, but don’t say that’s a liberal position. You’re doing something very different."

"And of course, they didn't like it. And it's just a good example of could everybody just stop the posturing? Don't pretend that you love migrants so much and then when we send them to you, you don't like them. You know, you're full of s--- and we can see that. Yeah, you liked them when it wasn't your problem because you're not a border state. And then when they show up in Chicago, in New York, you're like, What the f---? What are we going to do with these people?"

"I've spent 3 decades on T.V. mocking Republicans who said climate change was just a theory and now I have to deal with people who say you know what else is just a theory, biology?"

"That's where it all went wrong for us. It's again the same principle as I was saying before about like the reverse of what liberalism really is. Liberalism is for the sake of humanity and compassion; can we get these people off the streets? And woke is, ‘How dare you ask them to move! This is their home...’ No, it's not!"

"As an Ivy League graduate who knows the value of a liberal education, I have one piece of advice for the youth of America: Don’t go to college. And if you absolutely have to go, don’t go to an elite college, because as recent events have shown, it just makes you stupid."

"With communists, that human was no longer selfish. In America today, that human is no longer born male or female. And obesity is not something that affects health. You can be healthy at any size. Really, we voted on it. A formerly serious magazine (The Atlantic) last year published with a straight face an article called 'Separating Sports By Sex Doesn't Make Sense.' Yes, it does. Because, again, we haven't reinvented homo sapiens since Crystal Pepsi came out."

"Because, again, in China, we saw how a revolutionary thought he could do a page-one rewrite of humans. Mao ordered his citizens to throw off the four olds – old thinking, old culture, old customs, and old habits. So, your whole life went in the garbage overnight. No biggie. And those who resisted were attacked by an army of purifiers called the Red Guard who went around the country putting dunce caps on people who didn't take to being a new kind of mortal being. A lot of pointing and shaming went on. Oh, and about a million dead. And the only way to survive was to plead insanity for the crime of being insufficiently radical and then apologize and thank the State for the chance to see what a piece of shit you are, and of course, submit to re-education, or as we call it here in America, freshman orientation."

"The banjo player from Mumford and Sons tweeted that he liked a book. A book that apparently had not been approved by the revolution. So, of course, he had to delete the tweet, then take time away from the band. Oh my God! You mean this could have affected Mumford and Sons? And then the cringing apology, ‘I have come to better understand the pain caused by the book I endorsed.’ Pain? From a book? Unless he hit the drummer over the head with it. Whatever happened to, ‘I can read whatever the f*** I want?"

"The problem with communism and with some very recent ideologies here at home is that they think you can change reality by screaming at it, that you can bend human nature by holding your breath. But that’s the difference between reality and your mommy. Lincoln once said that you can repeal all past history, but you still cannot repeal human nature. But he’s canceled now, so f*** him."

"There are few if any positives to come out of what happened in Israel. But one is opening America’s eyes to how higher education has become indoctrination into a stew of bad ideals, among them the simplistic notion that the world is a binary place where everyone is either an oppressor or oppressed, in the case of Israel, oppressors being babies and bubbles."

"If you are part of today’s woke revolution, you need to study the part of revolutions where they spin out of control because the revolutionaries get so drunk on their own purifying elixir, they imagine they can reinvent the very nature of human beings."

"Communists thought selfishness, selfishness, could be cast out of human nature. Russian revolutionists spoke of the new Soviet Man who wasn’t motivated by self-interest but instead wanted to be part of the collective. No, it turns out he wanted to be on a yacht in a Gucci tracksuit, holding a vodka and a prostitute. Not standing all day in line for a potato."

"Good intentions can turn into the insane arrogance of thinking your revolution is so fucking awesome and your generation is so mind-bendingly improved that you have bequeathed the world with a new kind of human, you're welcome."

"There's only one faith, for example, that kills you or wants to kill you if you draw a bad cartoon of the prophet. There's only one faith that kills you or wants to kill you if you renounce the faith... obviously, most Muslim people are not terrorists. But ask most Muslim people in the world, if you insult the prophet, do you have what's coming to you? It's more than just a fringe element."

"The Holy Bible is practically an owner’s manual for slaveholders. The word ‘slave’ comes from Slav, because so many Slavic people were enslaved, and they’re as white as the Hallmark Channel. Who do you think gathered the slaves from the interior of Africa to sell to slave traders? Africans, who also kept their own slaves. We’re a species prone to making others of our species our bitch. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Humans are not good people, and the capacity for cruelty is a human thing, not a white thing. That’s the truth, even though it doesn’t jive with the current narrative."

"But in today’s world, when truth conflicts with narrative, it’s the truth that has to apologize. Being woke is like a magic moral time machine, where you judge everybody against what you imagine you would have done in 1066, and you always win."

"Did Columbus commit atrocities? Of course. But people back then were generally atrocious. Everybody who could afford one had a slave, including people of color. The way people talk about slavery these days, you’d think it was a uniquely American thing that we invented in 1619. But slavery throughout history has been the rule, not the exception: the Sumerians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, the British, the early Americans, all the way up through R. Kelly."