Home > Author > Robert Peate
1 " Stories are Life’s instruction manuals. "
― Robert Peate
2 " The state is a voluntary association of individuals designed to serve their individual interests. The state is not a faceless villain. The state is all of us. But freedom does not mean the freedom to commit violence. Violence includes direct and indirect action; i.e., it is just as violent to cause someone to starve to death by withholding aid as it is to shoot him, only sneakier. "
3 " And of course the World needs more love, but we need to be clear on what form that love will take. Sometimes love requires killing its object, to put it out of its misery or protect others. Sometimes love requires incarcerating its object to protect it or others. Sometimes love requires taxing and regulating its objects to protect and serve them. Sometimes love requires helping its object to help itself. Sometimes love requires giving its object a gift. But all of these are aspects of love, not merely the last, most popular example. I send love too, and my love takes many forms. My love varies with its objects. Yes, the World needs much more love. "
4 " The truth! Since when have the majority on Earth cared about the truth? "
5 " They support freedom for themselves and slavery for everyone else, and they use the freedom of the market to disguise this fact. Economic coercion is just a different form of force, which they couple with the fraud of calling it freedom. I was like them, but I will never be like them again. "
6 " Work or die’—this is the essence of slavery, of compulsion. And yet this is our world. Most of our world is enslaved but does not know it. Only the homeless are free, and for their freedom we sentence them to death. To refuse compulsion is to earn death, suffering, and calumny. It is not to refuse work—the homeless work very hard, endure many hardships we cannot imagine in our comfortable slavery. And yet we call our slavery freedom. We do not know what freedom means, yet. "
7 " What could be better for slave owners than slaves who think they’re free? This is the greatest trick ever pulled: a nation of slaves who think they’re free. Slaves must be fed, housed, even clothed. But if they must feed, house, and clothe themselves as ‘payment’ for their work, this removes burden from the slave owner—while the same work is performed and accomplished, to the benefit of the slave owner. The best part is that slaves who think they’re free will never work to end their slavery. They will look down on those who do not work. To work to end their slavery, they must first learn they are slaves. This is the hardest task of all: to free their minds. "
8 " It has been said that civilization is the process of freeing human beings from each other, and that is true. But it takes people to free each other, because people cannot be freed from each other except by each other. The irony of this cannot be overstated. "
9 " But the distinction is important and must be made: the highest virtue is not to give or to take. It is to share. And what I didn’t understand most of my life is that sharing includes serving oneself. It is a subtle distinction, one too subtle for most adults, though most children understand it. "
10 " I provoke thought, because that is what needs provoking. Humanity seems to hate thinking more than any other activity, and yet that is the activity most needed. I do what I can to force thought along, and I am hated and worse—ignored—for it. That's ultimately acceptable to me, because the work needs to be performed; I can perform it; and I wish to perform it. Let others appreciate it or not as they may; it pleases me to do what I do, so I do it. "
11 " I think we need to be beholden to each other. "
― Robert Peate , Sisyphus Shrugged
12 " If you make others think, you will be feared. If you disagree with them, you will be disliked. If you condemn them, they will hate you—anything but re-examine their positions and why they hold them. Anything but consider they might be wrong. It is they who insist on being right, not the one who examines even him- or herself. "
13 " Writing means organizing your thoughts. If your mind is scattered, your writing is scattered. If your mind is focused, your writing will be clear. Then your reader will say, 'Yes, I get it. "
14 " We are connected to each other, Mister Galt. We are considerate. We think about others. We give to others. But in return we get it back. We do affect each other. Human beings—all life forms—are not fully free, nor are they meant to be. Complete freedom isn’t any beautiful thing, because it means you’re not getting anything back either. I think we need to be beholden to each other. "
15 " I think the purpose of government is for a population to accomplish its mutually agreed-upon goals without every citizen having to accomplish those goals for him- or herself. Some examples: we have a police force so we don’t need to have vigilante mobs. We have a post office so we don’t need to deliver our own mail across the entire nation. We have a fire department so we don’t have to put out our own fires.In return for the services we agree on, we pay a fee.We just don’t all agree on what the services and what the fees should be.I personally think it’s sad we don’t all agree on single-payer health care. We agree on paying taxes to save a house from fire but not a body from cancer? Why do we care more about our property than about ourselves? "
16 " Persons like you say, ‘I’m an individual, therefore I oppose any power over me.’ That right there does not follow. How about ‘I’m an individual, therefore I notice and understand my place in the grand scheme of things’? I’ve heard of persons who don’t feel small in the vastness of Nature or intimidated by its challenges, and that strikes me as a lack of perspective. If all you can see is yourself, you’re not seeing very far. How about, ‘I’m an individual, therefore I notice and understand that my success depends on others’ success, because we’re all interconnected’? That does not negate my individuality or threaten my freedom. We support each other on a team. Your problem is you don’t know we’re all on the same team, because you’re too busy holding the ball, saying, ‘Mine!’, and not playing the game with good sportsmanship. Yeah, good sportsmanship. Ever heard of that? "
17 " In the event of total freedom, the desire to dominate rules just as tyrannically as it does with centrally-planned economies. Freedom gave us capitalism, which has come to mean bosses ordering workers about. Workers aren’t free; they are chained by their biological needs. Where is their freedom? Oh, the freedom of mobility? They can quit their jobs and work elsewhere? They can switch from one slave-owner to another? The capitalist vision ignores the capitalist reality, which is that bosses tells workers what to do under pain of death by starvation. Tell me that is freedom some more. Tell me another good one. "
18 " We would all like to see a perfect moral state with no government being necessary at all. That is not reality. To the extent government is necessary, it is desirable, to keep us from each other’s throats, to keep the powerful from winning every dispute by virtue of their wealth. ‘Might makes right’ is not only no way to run a country, it is the opposite of a perfectly moral state. It is, in fact, what you claim to oppose: the decision-maker answerable to no one, who suffers no consequence for his errors. You say it is wrong for government not to feel the pain of loss when it makes mistakes. You say it is wrong for the private citizen to suffer the consequences. And yet you place that same power in the hands of the wealthy without complaint. Why? "
19 " You cannot claim to support individuality if you aren’t willing to trust other human beings. "
20 " You have been lied to. You were born into a system you did not create, though it was created by human beings. You were told that if you worked hard, dreamed big, and played by the rules, you could make it as well as anybody else. That was a lie, the fact that ‘dreaming big’ and ‘playing by the rules’ don’t go together aside. "
