Voices for Reason"The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, skepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin."
Thomas H. Huxley"You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion... Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough."
Aldous Huxley
"To control the consciousness of others becomes his (the mystic) only passion; power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lot of an abandoned mind."
"The Individual is the Fountainhead of any Society worthwhile. Freedom of the Individual is the only legitimate object of government: the Individual Conscience is the great inviolable."
Frank Lloyd Wright
"Government by force is a contradiction in terms and an impossibility in physics. Force is what is governed. Government originates in the moral faculty. . . . Government is a marginal requirement, necessary only in so far as the individual inhibitory faculty is not exercised according to agreement and natural right. Beyond that deferential, government is an enthronement of paralysis and death. . . . Thus government is secondary, instituted by agreement; life, which pertains to the individual, is primary. Government is an agent, not an entity."
Isabel Paterson
"
. . .without the issue being named, economists are in a similar position to the old astronomers, whose knowledge that the earth revolved around the sun not only appeared to contradict what everyone could see for himself but also stood as a challenge to the entire theological view of the universe. Economics and capitalism are a comparable challenge to the morality of altruism. It is almost certain that economics and capitalism will be unable to gain sufficient cultural acceptance to ensure the influence of the one and the survival of the other until there is a radical change in people's ideas concerning morality and ethics, and that this change will have to be effected in fields other than economics-notably, philosophy and psychology. . . . "
Michael S. Berliner:
In short, America was not founded upon the idea of dependency and self-sacrifice for the greater good but rather independence, free will, autonomy.
Let’s put the “I”, meaning your individual pursuit of your own happiness, back into Independence Day!
