Andrew Bernstein Quotes

Each one of us has the power - and must develop the will - to be the hero of his own life. We believe in goals, in purposes, in achievement and in the joy of living.

Statism systematically violates the rights of individuals and is, therefore, immoral. Because it suppresses the mind and violates men's rights, it thereby causes abysmal poverty and is utterly impractical.

First, he must hold rational values, and to do this he must be a thinker.

Throughout history, independent minds have carried mankind forward. Whether they identified how to make fire or manufacture tools, develop rational philosophy or create man-glorifying art, pioneer scientific knowledge or invent the electric light, independent thinkers have created the goods on which human life and prosperity depend.

A hero holds purposes appropriate to man and is, therefore, a thinker.

The hero is valorous because he stands up to every threat directed against his values. Heroism requires value conflict.

Altruism demands that an individual serve others, but doesn't stipulate whether those others should be one's family, or the homeless, or society as a whole. Collectivism states that, in politics, society comes first and the individual must obey. Collectivism is the application of the altruist ethics to politics.

Nothing is given to man on earth - struggle is built into the nature of life, and conflict is possible - the hero is the man who lets no obstacle prevent him from pursuing the values he has chosen.

Here is the tragedy of theology in its distilled essence: The employment of high-powered human intellect, of genius, of profoundly rigorous logical deduction - studying nothing. In the Middle Ages, the great minds capable of transforming the world did not study the world; and so, for most of a millennium, as human beings screamed in agony - decaying from starvation, eaten by leprosy and plague, dying in droves in their twenties - the men of the mind, who could have provided their earthly salvation, abandoned them for otherworldly fantasies.

Theologians, and religionists in general, start with a fantasy premise and then proceed to apply rigorous formal logic to tease out its implications. Stark himself points out that "theology consists of formal reasoning about God." This is admirably exact. Theologians, beginning with a wished-for creation of their own minds, analyze that creation's characteristics by rigorous application of the principles of formal - that is, deductive - logic.