“The technology I like is the American paperback edition of Freedom. I can spill water on it and it would still work! So it's pretty good technology. And what’s more, it will work great 10 years from now. So no wonder the capitalists hate it. It’s a bad business model,” said Franzen, who famously cuts off all connection to the internet when he is writing.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/hay-festival/9047981/Jonathan-Franzen-e-books-are-damaging-society.html

"Is true freedom but to break
Fetters for our own dear sake
And with leathern hearts forget
That we owe mankind a debt?


"No! true freedom is to share
All the chains our brothers wear,
And with heart and hand to be
Earnest to make others free."

http://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/brown/brown.html

William Wells Brown, Clotel.

"laissez faire" philosophy did not prevent the economically powerful from establishing control over wages, prices, and distribution of goods; it only prevented the government from doing so.

http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

Count your horror stories of attempted trust. Recollect. We then compare and decide we’ve equally been outdone by strangers we’ll never see again. Afterwards, mutual disinterest is the universal result; the only exceptions proving the rule: love takes a little distrust of self.

I can love you because I want to feel less alone, or I can love you because I want you to feel less alone. But only the latter requires me to imagine a consciousness independent of my own, and equally real.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/magazine/why-write-novels-at-all.html?pagewanted=2&_r=4&ref=books

“I cannot here withhold the statement that optimism, where it is not merely the thoughtless talk of those who harbour nothing but words under their shallow foreheads, seems to me to be not merely an absurd, but also a really wicked, way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the unspeakable sufferings of mankind.”

Schopschop

http://www.the-spearhead.com/2010/10/01/a-plea-to-the-feminine/

“One side of the mouth spews empowerment and independence (from men), the other side asks, “Where are all the good men?” Where? You don’t need us and we need to be needed by you.”

Earlier in my life there seemed to be unlimited possibilities, but my mind was closed. Now, years later and with an open mind, possibilities no longer interest me. I seem content to be continually rearranging the same furniture in the same room. My concern at times is nothing more than establishing a series of practical conditions that will enable me to work. For years I said if I could only find a comfortable chair I would rival Mozart. - Morton Feldman

http://www.therestisnoise.com/2006/06/morton_feldman_.html

Ethics—self-interest. For Rand, all altruists were manipulators. What could be more seductive to kids who discerned the motives of martyr parents, Christian missionaries and U.S. foreign aiders? Her champions, Nathaniel Branden still among them, feel that Rand’s view of “self-interest” has been horribly misrepresented. For them, self-interest is her hero architect Howard Roark turning down a commission because he couldn’t do it exactly his way. Some of Rand’s novel heroes did have integrity, however, for Rand there is no struggle to discover the distinction between true integrity and childish vanity. Rand’s integrity was her vanity, and it consisted of getting as much money and control as possible, copulating with whomever she wanted regardless of who would get hurt, and her always being right.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif To equate one’s selfishness, vanity, and egotism with one’s integrity liberates young people from the struggle to distinguish integrity from selfishness, vanity, and egotism.

Bruce E. Levine

http://www.alternet.org/reproductivejustice/153454/how_ayn_rand_seduced_generations_of_young_men_and_helped_make_the_u.s._into_a_selfish,_greedy_nation/?page=3