Libertarianism In Media

"Snake: Chico, growing up means choosing how you're gonna live your life. [...] Treasure your memories, Chico. No matter what happens, keep them safe. [...] Nothing to be ashamed of. Pain gets the better of us all. [...] Remember, real heroes, are never as polished as the legends that surround them."

"Snake: [to Amanda] There's always another reason to keep on living."

"Paz: In school, I also learned that peace is an unnatural state for human society. And that war is a constant threat to our relationship with others."

"Dalton: What do you plan to do once your wounds heal up? Got any ideas? Snake: No plans. Just a personal goal. Dalton: And what would that be? Snake: To keep on living. All this time, I've been searching for my past. And now I know that I don't have one. I was manufactured in a lab. I'm not even a real human. I've got no past, and might not have much of a future. Nothing. But I'm alive. I was made to be a weapon. And I don't have squat to my name. But... as long as there's air in my lungs and blood in my veins, I'm gonna live. Right? Dalton: You're half right. You're way off about having nothing, though."

"Venus: Don't worry about Snake. He's been to hell and back. He's a survivor, you know. Always has been, always will be. Takiyama: ... Venus: He'll be just fine. I'm always right about these things."

"Lucy: You're a cloned soldier—patterned after the legendary Solid Snake. We recovered his body from Lobito Island and created you through a fusion of his cells and our data. You were our Model 3, Snake."

"Alice: The Children of Hamelin looked up to you as a hero. You were a man created by those in power and performed mighty works for them. The Legendary Hero—Solid Snake. That's what we were always taught. [...] Our pledge was, "May me someday be great like the honorable and mighty Snake.""

"La Clown: If I die here, it means I'm not the hero. The hero is supposed to survive to the end. So... I guess that makes me the villain. The villain is always supposed to take the hero's side right before dying."

"Hans: [to Snake] Are you familiar with the term "doppelganger"? Everyone has two personalities in them. One of them a persona for everyday public life, and the other the exact opposite. The personality lurking in one's subconscious is referred to as the "Shadow" in psychological terms. The Shadow negates its symmetrical opposite, the "Light" persona, and in some cases grows to the same level. If it manages to grow large enough, it takes on its own shape, separates from the body, and can walk around on its own. And that, my friend, is why we're both here."

"Solid Snake: Life isn't just about passing on your genes. We can leave behind much more than just DNA. Through speech, music, literature and movies...what we've seen, heard, felt...anger, joy and sorrow...these are the things I will pass on. That's what I live for. We need to pass the torch, and let our children read our messy and sad history by its light.We have all the magic of the digital age to do that with. The human race will probably come to an end some time, and new species may rule over this planet. Earth may not be forever, but we still have the responsibility to leave what traces of life we can. Building the future and keeping the past alive are one and the same thing."

"Revolver Ocelot: Gift of the silver tongue. They say it's the mark of a good officer... and of a liar. Americans are too in love with the sound of their own voice to speak the truth."

"Big Boss: The nightmares? They never go away, Snake. Once you've been on the battlefield, tasted the exhilaration, the tension... it all becomes part of you. Once you've awakened the warrior within... it never sleeps again. You crave ever bigger tensions, ever bigger thrills. As a mercenary, I'd think you would have realized that by now. You care nothing for power, or money, or even sex. The only thing that satisfies your cravings is war! All I've done is give you a place for it. I've given you a reason to live."

"Big Boss: You destroyed Metal Gear 1 and made me a cyborg. Now I want revenge."

"[Intro text] Lt. Snake, we received information from our intelligence man at the enemy's base. They have a weapon. Is it Metal Gear, which you destroyed 3 years ago? Go to the enemy base with 2 men. The pilot knows the route."

"Big Boss: ...can you hear me? Solid Snake... I'm not dead... Someday, I'll get even with you. Someday... we will meet again!"

"Solid Snake: This is Solid Snake... Metal Gear has been destroyed. Operation Intrude N313 was a success! No big deal, the job is done, that's all... No big deal... I'm coming back now... OVER"

"Big Boss: Solid Snake! I've been expecting you... I am the supreme commander of the FOXHOUND unit... And... The leader of the fortress of Outer Heaven, Big Boss! I gave this mission to you, a rookie, thinking I could use you to fool the rest of the world... But you were too good. You went too far! Solid Snake! I'm not going down alone. I'm taking you with me! Prepare to die!"

"As far as a character that’s evolved with the hardware, that would have to be Snake. If you look at the original Metal Gear, he was a very silent type of character—-he didn’t speak much. Probably the reason for that is, on that hardware, we were unable to make the characters speak. You could compare it to movies. The original Metal Gears were kind of like silent-era movies and Metal Gear Solid 1 is when it became talkies and sound movies. But at the same time with Metal Gear Solid 1, he could speak but there still wasn’t emotion on the face. So everything had to be done through the voices. He had to say whether or not he liked something or if he was feeling hot or it hurt. Everything had to be explained vocally. Then we saw 2000, the next step in his evolution, where we could have emotion on his face. We get things like motion-capture and try to make games realistic and believable. That was the next stage in his evolution. For Metal Gear Solid 4, we were able to get more resolution and add more detail to the faces. We added wrinkles and we added the aspect of age to the equation. So: telling a story through wrinkles. If you really look at the evolution of Snake, the character, it’s also looking at the evolution of the gaming industry and hardware. I think that’s something that’s pretty unique to Snake as a character and you don’t see it in any other form of media where the character evolves with hardware."

"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."

"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 refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world. Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human life. Whether you live or die is an absolute. Whether you have a piece of bread or not, is an absolute. Whether you eat your bread or see it vanish into a looter's stomach, is an absolute."

"(T)he idealized world Ayn Rand has created to facilitate her wishful theorizing has no more logical connection to our real one than a world in which an author has imagined humanity ruled by intelligent cups of yogurt. This is most obviously revealed by the fact that in Ayn Rand’s world, a man who self-righteously instigates the collapse of society, thereby inevitably killing millions if not billions of people, is portrayed as a messiah figure rather than as a genocidal prick, which is what he’d be anywhere else."

"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

"Like her other works of fiction and nonfiction, the book Atlas Shrugged manages to be both deeply sinister and deeply ridiculous, which isn’t so easy to do. Today there is a very small minority of economists who take her ideas seriously. There are virtually no biologists, anthropologists, sociologists, ethologists, geneticists or evolutionary theorists who do. Her ideas about the individual simply do not fit the objective research about how our species behaves and prospers."

"I never made it through either of Rand’s two big novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. To enjoy either, I suspect, you had to have encountered Rand in adolescence, when so many of life’s lasting enthusiasms are forged. In recent years, a few friends have urged Rand on me, and I dutifully tried both novels more than once. Each time, I found myself oscillating between fits of the giggles, at the awful prose, and irritation, at the jejune philosophy."

"There have even been outright bad writers blessed by the visitation of a poetic title. Ayn Rand had one with The Fountainhead, and another with Atlas Shrugged: a bit of a mouthful... Yet if those were not two of the worst books ever written - the worst books ever written don't even get published - they were certainly among the worst books ever to be taken seriously."

"Atlas Shrugged is not merely a novel. It is also — or may I say: first of all — a cogent analysis of the evils that plague our society…. You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: "You are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you.""

"From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: "To a gas chamber — go!""

"Get the hell out of my way!"

"Never think of pain or danger or enemies a moment longer than is necessary to fight them."

"I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."

"In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it's yours."

"The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it."

"You called it selfish and cruel that men should trade value for value—you have now established an unselfish society where they trade extortion for extortion. Your system is a legal civil war, where men gang up on one another and struggle for possession of the law, which they use as a club over rivals, till another gang wrests it from their clutch and clubs them with it in their turn, all of them clamoring protestations of service to an unnamed public's unspecified good. You had said that you saw no difference between economic power and political power, between the power of money and the power of guns—no difference between reward and punishment, between purchase and plunder, between pleasure and fear, between life and death. You are learning the difference now."

"The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man's self-defense, and, as such, may resort to force only against those who start the use of force. The only proper functions of government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach and fraud by others, to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law."

"Only a ghost can exist without material property; only a slave can work with no right to the product of his effort. The doctrine that 'human rights' are superior to 'property rights' simply means that some human beings have the right to make property out of others; since the competent have nothing to gain from the incompetent, it means the right of the incompetent to own their betters and to use them as productive cattle."

"The modern mystics of muscle who offer you the fraudulent alternative of 'human rights' versus 'property rights,' as if one could exist without the other, are making a last, grotesque attempt to revive the doctrine of soul versus body."

"Learn to distinguish the difference between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality. An error of knowledge is not a moral flaw, […] a breach of morality is the conscious choice of an action you know to be evil, or a willful evasion of knowledge, a suspension of sight and of thought. That which you do not know, is not a moral charge against you; but that which you refuse to know, is an account of infamy growing in your soul. Make every allowance for errors of knowledge; do not forgive or accept any breach of morality."

"Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life."

"To fear to face an issue is to believe that the worst is true."

"Madam, when we'll see men dying of starvation around us, your heart won't be of any earthly use to save them. And I'm heartless enough to say that when you'll scream, 'But I didn't know it!'—you will not be forgiven."

"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns—or dollars. Take your choice—there is no other—and your time is running out."

"When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, 'Who is destroying the world?' You are."

"When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion—when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing—when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors—when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you—when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice—you may know that your society is doomed."

"In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law, men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims—then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter."

"Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it. Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another—their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun."

"Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants; money will not give him a code of values, if he's evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he's evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not yet discovered; that no man may be smaller than his money. Is that the reason why you call it evil?"

"Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires."

"Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade—with reason, not force, as their final arbiter—it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability—and the degree of a man's productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?"

"But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made—before it can be looted or mooched—made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced."