Seek out argument and disputation for its own sake, The grave will provide plenty of time for silence." - Letters to a Young Contrarian

You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. - Winston Churchill

Distrust any speaker who talks confidently about “we,” or speaks in the name of “us.” Distrust yourself if you hear these tones creeping into your own style. Always ask who this “we” is; as often as not it’s an attempt to smuggle tribalism through the customs. - The late Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian, 2001

"To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open. It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order. It means adopting the burden of self-conscious vulnerability and accepting the end of the unconscious paradise of childhood, where finitude and mortality are only dimly comprehended. It means willingly undertaking the sacrificees necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality" - Jordan Peterson, 12 rules for life

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these . Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime. - Mark Twain

“If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.” ― Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

I know a place in America called Point-no-Point, because as you proceed along the shore, gay and flowery as Mr. Burke's language, it continually recedes and presents itself at a distance before you; but when you have got as far as you can go, there is no point at all. Just thus it is with Mr. Burke's three hundred and sixty-six pages. - Thomas Paine, Rights of Man

“When the enemy is relaxed, make them toil. When full, starve them. When settled, make them move.” ― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

We are all doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes. - Aldous huxley, doors to perception

To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That's what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul - would you understand why that's much harder? - Ayn Rand - The Fountainhead

"The most perceptive character in the play is the fool, because the man who wishes to be seen simple cannot possibly be a simpleton" - Don Quixote

'In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity' - Sun Tzu

Rebellion to tyranny is obedience to God - Benjamin Franklin

You can’t build a house without nails and wood. If you don’t want a house built, hide the nails and wood. If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy. Any man who can take a TV wall apart and put it back together again, and most men can, nowadays, is happier than any man who tries to slide rule, measure, and equate the universe, which just won’t be measured or equated without making man feel bestial and lonely. I know, I’ve tried it; to hell with it. So bring on your clubs and parties, your acrobats and magicians, your daredevils, jet cars, motorcycle helicopters, your sex and heroin, more of everything to do with automatic reflex. If the drama is bad, if the film says nothing, if the play is hollow, sting me with the Theremin, loudly. I’ll think I’m responding to the play, when it’s only a tactile reaction to vibration. But I don’t care. I just like solid entertainment. - Beatty, Fahrenheit 451

The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in hardness against themselves and others, in experiments. Their joy is self-conquest: asceticism becomes in them nature, need, and instinct. Difficult tasks are a privilege to them; to play with burdens that crush others, a recreation. Knowledge–a form of asceticism. They are the most venerable kind of man: that does not preclude their being the most cheerful and the kindliest. - Neitzsche, The Antichrist

“Most lead lives at worst so painful, at best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principle appetites of the soul.” - Huxley

To rush headlong into the comforting darkness of selfhood as a reborn human being, or even as beast, an unhappy ghost, a denizen of hell. Anything rather than the burning brightness of unmitigated Reality.” - Huxley

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point ]that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others” - Dostoyevsky

“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.” - Dostoyevsky

"Solutions to problems, easy or difficult, is the stamp of modernity. While antiquity treated the tensions as permanent" - Allan Bloom