Quotations.

My response to the repetitious and, if I may say, bland questions as to the life choice I've taken can be fairly summarized by the following quotations.  (Pasintabi kina Emerson, Thoreau, Mao, Ghandi, Rand and, yes, Christ.)

“Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you tha...t you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising which tempt you to believe that your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires courage.”

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

“What's the use of a fine house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?”

“If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things”

“Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.”

“Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.”

"One cannot advance without mistakes... It is necessary to make mistakes. The party cannot be educated without learning from mistakes. This has great significance."

"One needs to be slow to form convictions, but once formed they must be defended against the heaviest odds."

"'Ambition' means the systematic pursuit of achievement and of constant improvement in respect to one’s goal. Like the word 'selfishness,' and for the same reasons, the word 'ambition' has been perverted to mean only the pursuit of dubious or evil goals, such as the pursuit of power; this left no concept to designate the pursuit of actual values. But 'ambition' as such is a neutral concept: the evaluation of a given ambition as moral or immoral depends on the nature of the goal. A great scientist or a great artist is the most passionately ambitious of men. A demagogue seeking political power is ambitious. So is a social climber seeking 'prestige.' So is a modest laborer who works conscientiously to acquire a home of his own. The common denominator is the drive to improve the conditions of one’s existence, however broadly or narrowly conceived. ('Improvement' is a moral term and depends on one’s standard of values. An ambition guided by an irrational standard does not, in fact, lead to improvement, but to self-destruction.)"

"Politically, the goal of today’s dominant trend is statism. Philosophically, the goal is the obliteration of reason; psychologically, it is the erosion of ambition. The political goal presupposes the two others. The human characteristic required by statism is docility, which is the product of hopelessness and intellectual stagnation. Thinking men cannot be ruled; ambitious men do not stagnate."

“What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul.”