Category Archives: Ayn Rand

Re: the July 28 column "What do we really have a 'right' to? Think principles, not entitlements."

Well, that is certainly a load of laughable pie in the sky. Message to planet Ayn Rand: Human beings live in complex societies. Human beings historically don't do too well on their own. There is a concept of civitas worth considering. Does the writer live in self-sustaining bubble out in the desert? Does he drive on the roads, does he have a library card, does he drink clean water out of a tap, does he take Social Security, does he avail himself of public services and Tucson Parks and Recreation?

There is give and take. Services are taken and payment is given. This applies morally as well. Principles are nice. But instead of citing Patrick Henry, the writer should adopt a roadway and pick up some trash. Be a citizen.

Disclaimer: As submitted to the Arizona Daily Star.

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Letter: Message to planet Ayn Rand - Arizona Daily Star

The Republican plan to replace Obamacare did not go nearly far enough in repealing government intervention in the health care market, the president of the nonprofit Ayn Rand Institute, Yaron Brook, told The Daily Caller.

Brook argues that Republicansshould push to roll back the government restrictions that existed in the health care system even before the Affordable Care Act, so that we can really see how a free market health care system can work.

The replace would be very different from what I think the Republicans are proposing. Im against just repealing Obamacare because before Obamacare health care in the U.S. was heading in a bad direction. The cost was too high, too many people did not have insurance. But the solution to it is not more government, the solution is less government, he told TheDC.

Brook is the author of Equal is Unfair: Americas Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality, and a staunch advocate for the free market and capitalism. The Ayn Rand Institute pushes an objectivist political philosophy.

He is calling on Republicans to completely deregulate the insurance industry so that theres none of these requirements to cover pre-existing conditions or requirements to cover I dont know acupuncture and alternative health and all the nonsense that has to be covered in every single policy which makes it so expensive. Let there be a true, free market in insurance policies, let there be a true free market in doctors, in hospitals, let there be transparent pricing, real competition. I mean, so the replace should be more free market. I dont know why the assumption is that by replace, you have to replace it with more government programs. No, the replace should be to take all the pre-Obamacare government programs, eliminate them completely and establish a completely free market in health care, he told TheDC.

Brook went on to say that, I would prefer that we ban states from regulating the health insurance industries but I guess the Federalists among the Republicans would object to that. The state has no business regulating health Insurance. I, as the consumer, am in a far better position than any government bureaucrat to determine what kind of health insurance I should buy for myself. All of this is premised in the assumption that we are too stupid to know whats good for us and that a government bureaucrat is in a better position to know.

The government has been involved in the health care industry in the United States since World War II. Ever sincethen, the government has been largely unsuccessful in creating policies that drive prices down and improve the quality of health care. When asked why he thinks the government is unable to do health care well, he said, I ask audiences all the time, what do they think the iPhone would look like if the government designed it? Everybody always laughs because everybody knows its an absurd question because the iPhone wouldnt exist and if it existed it would be this monster, ugly, inefficient, unproductive instrument that nobody would want to use. And then I ask them OK, well if you dont trust the iPhone to government why are you willing to trust health care to government? The government is not structured to do health care, and it cannot be structured to do it because the essence of government is force.

The essence of government is a gun, its coercion, its compulsion. Coercion, compulsion and force have no place in health care. Health care, like all other goods and services, should be a product of voluntary trade between individuals. Theres no place for compulsion, theres not place for force, theres no place for the mindlessness, that is the essential characteristic of almost all government programs.

Last Friday Gov. John Kasich (R-OH) said that the Senate bill is still unacceptable and the Medicaid cuts are too deep. In the past, Kasich has asserted that it is his Evangelical duty to keep and expand Medicaid and to do otherwise would be immoral. Brook says that, I mean I agree with him from an Evangelical perspective that its immoral to cut medicaid. I think that until we get rid of the morality and moral code of Evangelicals, we will not get rid of Obamacare, we will not cut medicaid, we will not transition to free market health care. Free market health care requires a completely different, moral, ethical approach. It requires the morality of individualism. It is my moral responsibility to my family and self and then, if I choose to help other people, it has to be my voluntary choice and it has to be consistent with my values.

Free market capitalism in America requires an Ayn Rand moral code. It requires a moral code of rational self interest and thats the real challenge. That is the real barrier that prevents Republicans from truly repealing Obamacare.

In the event that Obamacare is completely repealed, Dr. Brook sympathizes with those who will lose their health insurance. Once you stop subsidizing as much as Obamacare does and take the mandate away, a lot of people will not buy health insurance. But part of the reason for that is that all the regulations that preexist in Obamacare make health insurance too expensive. So I sympathize with people who say I cant afford my health insurance, thats sad, its not a good thing. The solution to that is not more government intervention, the solution to that is less government intervention. More competitive insurance markets and more options in terms of types of insurance insurance companies should be able to sell. And if you do that, then there will be insurance policies cheap enough so that those 22 million people can get and will get coverage.

Even with the Senate, the House and the White House, Republicans are struggling to put forward a viable alternative to Obamacare. With #RepealObamacare trending on Twitter recently, many members of Trumps base are urgingthe GOP to repeal Obamacare completely. This week, President Trump reminded the Republicans that they must keep their promise to America and repeal Obamacare.

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'The Government Is Not Structured To Do Health Care,' Says President Of Ayn Rand Institute - The Daily Caller

What would Ayn Rand Paul Ryan do?

The Religious Right has driven the GOPs party platform since it hijacked the party in the 80s.

And now that the Republicans are dancing with the devil who brought them to the 2016 Election dance, regular Americans should wonderwhy are the loudest voices against affordable health care, Medicare, and Medicaid, also the ones who talk about their faith the loudest?

And how do theyfrom the libertarian wing of the GOP to the Tea Party faithful, from Rand Paul to Paul Ryan and a large swath of leading politiciansreconcile their love for Ayn Rands anti-collectivist, pro-capitalism, anti-altruistic, and anti-religion beliefs with the patriotic Christianity that they layer in every public policy iteration and rhetorical soundbite?

Seriously. How do they do it?

Either this is high-level genius thinking, contradiction beyond reproach, an understanding of the Christian Gospels that differs from generations of those who have interpreted religious text as altruistic and compassionate, or a new form of logic that is fit only for politicians.

Or something elselike malignant narcissism, magical thinking, confirmation bias, and/or the need for power.

The powerful have always done what they want because they can, whether its writing religion, grandstanding on religious principles, or lying to the public enough so that the faithful wont think twice.

But were all supposed to be smarter than that at this point, yes?

Lets talk about it.

Respond below!

Photo: Getty Images

Jeremy McKeen is a high school English teacher, coach, musician, and father of three. He has been featured on Salon, The Huffington Post, Yahoo! Parenting, Scary Mommy, YourTango, and Medium, among other magazines and blogs. In addition to his column on The Good Men Project, he is also a Lead Editor. You can find him on Facebook and Twitter.

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Ayn Rand or Jesus Christfor Health Care Reform? What would Ayn Rand Paul Ryan do? - The Good Men Project (blog)

Bloomberg via Getty Images

Make it stop.

Steve Bannon, the White House chief strategist composed of two parts vile racism and one part Jabba the Hutt, doesn't do many public appearances these days. But the nuggets that do trickle out about what he says in private indicate that he is equipped with an unsurprisingly sharp (and occasionally anti-Semitic) tongue. A new book profiling Bannon's meteoric rise from xenophobic blogger to West Wing confidante has already yielded some batshit details about his private life, but this onean insult he used to describe Paul Ryan, whom Bannon feared would try to steal the nomination from Donald Trump at the GOP conventionis so devastatingly cruel that it made me want to lay down on the floor and quietly wait for death's sweet release.

EDITORS PICK

News & Culture

Paul Ryan Still Hasn't Recovered from This Hero Teen's Devastating Dab

Here it is, courtesy of TPM:

According to Green, Bannon also waged his assault-by-epithet aloud in Breitbarts Washington, D.C. headquarters: He described the House speaker as a limp-dick motherfucker who was born in a petri dish at the Heritage Foundation."

A memorial service for what little remained of Paul Ryan's soul will be held on Thursday afternoon at 2 P.M. outside of the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, California. Attire is country club casual and/or grungy YMCA chic. In lieu of flowers, please consider making a donation to Planned Parenthood of America.

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Steve Bannon's Devastating Paul Ryan Burn Will Make You Want to Crawl Into a Hole and Die - GQ Magazine

Much of the discussion regarding recent efforts in Congress to pass the latest tax cut, er, I mean health care legislation, for some reason puts me in mind of the late Ayn Rand. As Im also a big fan of the Last Week Tonight show, I now draw upon them to help me convey my exasperation and incredulity that somehow she is still a thing.

We at San Diego Free Press love watching all kinds of video. Those short visual stories entertain, inform, and agitate in a way completely different from the written word.

Since our platform is about expressing ideas and ideals instead of cash flow, clicks, or fundraising, we have the freedom to include a wide range of topics and formats that might not work elsewhere. We dont need or want paid content, promotional materials, or story lines designed to please donors.

So the idea here is to present videos one or more of the editors feel speaks to them. Sometimes it will be news. Sometimes it will be history. And a lot of the time it will be culture. You can not and should not separate these things: it is diversity and intersectionality that makes our movement strong.

Feel free to suggest videos at contact@sandiegofreepress.org

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Ayn Rand How is She Still a Thing? : Video Worth Watching - San Diego Free Press

The hedge fund manager Edward S. Lampert, who some say has applied Rand's Objectivist principles to the management of Sears and Kmart, has driven those venerable retailers close to bankruptcy.

Andrew F. Puzder, Mr. Trump's first nominee for secretary of labor, is described by friends as an avid Ayn Rand reader. He's also chief executive of CKE Restaurants, which runs the Hardee's and Carl's Jr. fast-food chains and whose private equity owner, Roark Capital Group, is named for the architect-hero of "The Fountainhead." Mr. Puzder had to withdraw his nomination after allegations that his restaurant companies mistreated workers and promulgated sexist advertising.

The Whole Foods founder and chief executive John Mackey, an ardent libertarian and admirer of Rand, last month had to cede control of the troubled upscale grocery company to Amazon and Jeff Bezos (who, while often likened to a fictional Rand hero, has not mentioned her books when asked about his favorites).

And then there's the scandal-engulfed Trump administration, where devotion to Rand's teaching has done little to advance the president's legislative agenda.

Though people close to Mr. Kalanick told me this week that he has distanced himself from many of Rand's precepts while undergoing an intense period of personal reassessment, they all acknowledged that she'd had a profound influence on his development. Few companies have been as closely identified with Rand's philosophy as Uber.

Uber disrupted a complacent, highly regulated and often corrupt taxi industry on a global scale, an achievement Rand's heroes Howard Roark and Dagny Taggart would surely have admired. Many of her ideas were embedded in Uber's code of values. Mr. Kalanick used the original cover art for "The Fountainhead" as his Twitter avatar until 2013 (when he exchanged it for an image of Alexander Hamilton, and then, in May, for one of himself).

But Mr. Kalanick was urged to step down as chief executive by the Uber board and Uber's major investors over less heroic issues: that Uber fostered a workplace culture that tolerated sexual harassment and discrimination; that it ignored legal constraints, poaching intellectual property from Google's self-driving car endeavor and using technology to evade law enforcement; and that it failed to hire a chief operating officer or build an effective management team. (Mr. Kalanick remains on the board.)

"Rand's entrepreneur is the Promethean hero of capitalism," said Lawrence E. Cahoone, professor of philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross, whose lecture on Rand is part of his Great Courses series, "The Modern Political Tradition." "But she never really explores how a dynamic entrepreneur actually runs a business."

"She was a script and fiction writer," he continued. "She was motivated by an intense hatred of communism, and she put those things together very effectively. She can be very inspirational, especially to entrepreneurs. But she was by no means an economist. I don't think her work can be used as a business manual."

Representatives of Uber and Mr. Kalanick declined to comment.

Rand's defenders insist that the problems for Mr. Kalanick and others influenced by Rand aren't that they embraced her philosophy, but rather that they didn't go far enough.

Yaron Brook, executive chairman of the Ayn Rand Institute and a former finance professor at Santa Clara University, who teaches seminars on business leadership and ethics from an Objectivist perspective, said, "Few business people have actually read her essays and philosophy and studied her in depth." Mr. Brook said that while Mr. Kalanick "was obviously talented and energetic and a visionary, he took superficial inspiration from her ideas and used her philosophy to justify his obnoxiousness."

He emphasized that Rand would never have tolerated sexual harassment or any kind of mistreatment of employees. Rand "had enormous respect for people who worked hard and did a good job, whether a secretary or a railroad worker," he said. "Her heroes ran businesses with employees who were very loyal because they were treated fairly. Of course, some people had to be fired. But she makes a big deal out of the virtue of justice, which applies in business as well as politics."

And even though "she'd celebrate what Travis did with the taxi industry, showing the world how all those regulations made no sense, she also believed there are rules of justice that do make sense and she supported," he said. "You can't just run over all the regulations you don't happen to like."

Mr. Brook complained that Rand's critics are quick to point to her followers' failures, but rarely mention their successes. He cited the example of John A. Allison IV, the much-admired former head of BB&T Corporation, a regional bank in the Southeast that he built into one of the nation's largest before he stepped down in 2008. Mr. Allison handed out copies of "Atlas Shrugged" to senior executives and is a major donor to the Ayn Rand Institute. He incorporated many of Rand's teachings into his 2014 book, "The Leadership Crisis and the Free Market Cure."

"John is a gentleman and he actually studied Rand's works in depth," Mr. Brook said. "He couldn't be more different from Travis."

Mr. Allison has called for abolishing the Federal Reserve, while acknowledging that so drastic a step is unlikely. He has met with Mr. Trump at the White House and has been widely mentioned as a potential successor to Janet L. Yellen as Fed chief.

Despite Rand's pervasive influence and continuing popularity on college campuses, relatively few people embrace her version of extreme libertarianism. Former President Barack Obama, in a 2012 Rolling Stone interview, criticized her "narrow vision" and described her work "as one of those things that a lot of us, when we were 17 or 18 and feeling misunderstood, we'd pick up."

She's also dismissed by most serious academics. "Mention Ayn Rand to a group of academic philosophers and you'll get laughed out of the room," Mr. Cahoone said. "But I think there's something to be said for Rand. She takes Nietzschean individualism to an extreme, but she's undeniably inspirational."

As the mysterious character John Galt proclaims near the end of "Atlas Shrugged": "Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it's yours."

But Rand has little to say about making the transition from this kind of heroic entrepreneurial vision to a mature corporation with many stakeholders, a problem many company founders have confronted and struggled with, whether or not they've read or been influenced by her. "She never really had to manage anything," Mr. Cahoone said. "She was surrounded by people who saw her as a cult figure. She didn't have employees, she had worshipers."

For his part, Mr. Kalanick is said to have turned this summer from Rand to what is considered one of the greatest dramatic works in the English language, Shakespeare's "Henry V" a play in which the young, reckless and wayward Prince Hal matures into one of England's most revered and beloved monarchs.

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As a guru, Ayn Rand may have limits. Ask Travis Kalanick. - CNBC

While we wait to see exactly whats in the latest version of the Senate health bill, a reminder: throughout the whole campaign against Obamacare, Republicans have been lying about their intentions.

Believe it or not, conservatives actually do have a more or less coherent vision of health care. Its basically pure Ayn Rand: if youre sick or poor, youre on your own, and those who are more fortunate have no obligation to help. In fact, its immoral to demand that they help.

Specifically:

1.Health care, even the most essential care, is a privilege, not a right. If you cant get insurance because you have a preexisting condition, because your income isnt high enough, or both, too bad.

2.People who manage to get insurance through government aid, whether Medicaid, subsidies, or regulation and mandates that force healthy people to buy into a common risk pool, are takers exploiting the wealth creators, aka the rich.

3.Even for those who have insurance, it covers too much. Deductibles and copays should be much higher, to give people skin in the game and make them cost-conscious (even if theyre, um, unconscious.)

4.All of this applies to seniors as well as younger people. Medicare as we know it should be abolished, replaced with a voucher system that can be used to help pay for private policies and funding will be steadily cut below currently projected levels, pushing people into high-deductible-and-copay private policies.

This is a coherent doctrine; its what conservative health care experts say when they arent running for public office, or closely connected to anyone who is. I think its a terrible doctrine both cruel and wrong in practice, because buying health care isnt and cant be like buying furniture. Still, if Republicans had run on this platform and won, wed have to admit that the public agrees.

But think of how Republicans have actually run against Obamacare. Theyve lambasted the law for not covering everyone, even though their fundamental philosophy is NOT to cover everyone, or accept any responsibility for the uninsured. Theyve denied that their massive cuts to Medicaid are actually cuts, pretending to care about the people they not-so-privately consider moochers. Theyve denounced Obamacare policies for having excessively high deductibles, when higher deductibles are at the core of their ideas about cost control. And theyve accused Obamacare of raiding Medicare, a program theyve been trying to kill since 1995.

In other words, their whole political strategy has been based on lies not shading the truth, not spinning, but pretending to want exactly the opposite of what they actually want.

And this strategy was wildly successful, right up to the moment when Republicans finally got a chance to put their money or actually your money where their mouths were. The trouble theyre having therefore has nothing to do with tactics, or for that matter with Trump. Its what happens when many years of complete fraudulence come up against reality.

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Takers and Fakers - New York Times (blog)

DEL STONE JR. @DelSnwfdn

Has reading become a lost art?

Recently I posted that question on my Facebook and it sparked a lively conversation. Most everybody, people my age and older, agreed with me, of course. Its my page. They better agree. Others, however, told me people were getting smarter, that there were other forms of media interaction that offered the same cognitive experience as reading, and that I was one of those generational doomsayers.

(You know, that wacky uncle who, after his fourth or fifth Black Label, began thundering from on high about the end times and how the younger generation was carrying the world to hell in a handbasket and how much better things were when his generation was in charge neglecting to mention the parents of his generation were making the same gloomy pronouncements back in their day).

I followed up my question with the opinion that yes, reading has become a lost art. During the ensuing back-and-forth the idea of reading became bound up with the idea of intelligence, as if one begats the other.

In general Id say thats true. Readers are likely more book-smart than non, though theres much to be said for common sense, a rare commodity in this day of the social-media addiction. Whos smarter? The guy who quotes Arthur Schopenhauer in his poetry or the guy who fixes your kitchen sink? Most days my vote goes to the sink.

As a guy who works for a newspaper and tries to sell books, Im vested in the future of reading. I want the world to be smart, but its OK if it isnt, as long everybody reads. I dont care if youre reading Ayn Rand, 50 Shades of Gray or Richie Rich, as long as youre reading youre not out robbing and raping. Well, you better not, anyway.

My dad was Air Force and we moved around a lot. The longest we were anywhere was Spain, where we spent three unendurable years without TV. Except they werent unendurable. We camped. We went on picnics. We grilled out on the patio. And we read books, magazines and yes, comic books. The whole idea of Dick, Jane and Sally filled me with a vague sense of unease, as if there were something wrong with those three. But Superman and Wonder Woman were OK.

When we returned stateside we binged on TV as if it were cheap fast food fries and burgers, but eventually the reading habit returned. This time it was science fiction for me.

Now I work with words for a living. Does that make me smarter than you? Well, I definitely cant fix your sink, so you decide.

I Googled Are people getting smarter? and got mixed results. The answer seems to be: It depends. People think differently than they used to. Back in the early 1900s, people were more literal and practical. These days theyre more abstract and concepty.

I checked test scores, and guess what? They rose and fell, just like the earths temperatures in all those debates about global warming the warring factions throw at each other. Ultimately the test scores are meaningless because the tests themselves have been changed over the years. Its like that authentic George Washington shovel the blade has been replaced five times and the handle six.

Researchers tell us people who read a lot are better at solving complicated problems. Clearly they have not watched me trying to replace a windshield wiper. One conclusion thats indisputable readers are far and away better at focusing than a non-reader.

I can hardly believe a group of people who cannot focus long enough to recognize tweets being sent by NPR are snippets of the Declaration of Independence and not a call to dump Trump, are smarter than Thomas Edison, the Wright brothers or Nikola Tesla. Nor can I think of Snapcrap and Idiotgram as intellectually stimulating as The Iliad or The Grapes of Wrath.

Has reading become a lost art? Yes. Absolutely.

Is that a bad thing? For civilization, yes. Its bad.

Contact online editor Del Stone Jr. at (850) 315-4433 or dstone@nwfdailynews.com. Follow him on twitter at @delsnwfdn, and friend him on Facebook at dels nwfdn.

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DEL STONE JR.: Has reading become a lost art? - The Northwest Florida Daily News

Or, in Hannitys case, the crawl space beneath it.

In 1950, Lionel Trilling wrote that there were no conservative ideas in general circulation, only irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas. By the time Trilling died 25 years later the opposite was true: The only consequential ideas at the time were conservative, while it was liberalism that had been reduced to an irritable mental gesture.

This was largely Buckleys doing. Through National Review, his magazine, he gave a hidden American intelligentsia a platform to develop conservative ideas. Through Firing Line, his TV show, he gave an unsuspecting American public a chance to sample conservative wit. Not all of the ideas were right, but they were usually smart. And as they evolved, they went in the right direction.

Buckley learned to free himself of views that had come to him by the circumstances of his background that he concluded ran counter to values he cherished, notes Alvin Felzenberg in his superb new biography, A Man and His Presidents. Buckley shed isolationism, segregationism and anti-Semitism, and insisted the conservative movement do likewise. Over 50 years as the gatekeeper of conservative ideas, he denounced the inverted Marxism of Ayn Rand, the conspiracy theories of Robert Welch (founder of the John Birch Society) and the white populism of George Wallace and Pat Buchanan.

In March 2000, he trained his sights on the narcissist and demagogue Donald Trump. When he looks at a glass, he is mesmerized by its reflection, he wrote in a prophetic short essay in Cigar Aficionado. The resistance to a corrupting demagogy, he warned, should take first priority for Americans.

Buckley died in 2008. The conservatism he nourished was fundamentally literary: To play a significant part in it you had to know how to write, and in order to write well you had to read widely, and in order to do that you had to, well, enjoy reading. In hindsight, 2008, the year of Sarah Palin, was also the year when literary conservatism went into eclipse.

Suddenly, you didnt need to devote a month to researching and writing a 7,000-word critique of Obama administrations policy on, say, Syria to be taken seriously as a conservative foreign-policy expert. You just needed to mouth off about it for five minutes on The OReilly Factor. For books there were always ghostwriters; publicity on Fox ensured they would always top The Timess best-seller lists.

Influence ceased to be measured by respectability op-eds published in The Wall Street Journal; keynotes delivered to the American Enterprise Institute and came to be measured by ratings. The quality of an idea could be tested not by its ability to withstand scrutiny from experts, but by the willingness of people to swallow it.

It shouldnt be a surprise that a post-literate conservative world should have been so quick to embrace a semi-literate presidential candidate. Nor, in hindsight, is it strange that, with the role Buckley once played in maintaining conservative ideological hygiene retired, the ideas he expunged should have made such a quick and pestilential comeback.

Thus, when Hannity peddles conspiracy theories about Seth Rich, the young Democratic National Committee staffer murdered in Washington last year, thats an echo of John Birch. When fellow Fox host Tucker Carlson who once aspired to be the next Buckley and now aims to be the next Ann Coulter tries to reinvent himself as the tribune of the working class, hes speaking for the modern-day George Wallace voter. Isolationism is already back, thanks to Trump. Anti-Semitism cant be far behind, either, and not just on the alt-right.

And so we reach the Idiot stage of the conservative cycle, in which a Buckley Award for Sean Hannity suggests nothing ironic, much less Orwellian, to those bestowing it, applauding it, or even shrugging it off. The award itself is trivial, but its a fresh reminder of who now holds the commanding heights of conservative life, and what it is that they think.

In the financial world, we know how this stage ended for investors, not to mention the rest of the country. The political right might consider that a similar destiny awaits.

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Sean Hannity Is No William F. Buckley - New York Times

No one can deny the power of a good quote. They motivate and inspire us to be our best.

Here are 38 of my absolute favorites:

1. "I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the water to create many ripples." -Mother Teresa

2. "I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." -Maya Angelou

3. "Whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right." -Henry Ford

4. "Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence." -Vince Lombardi

5. "Life is 10 percent what happens to me and 90 percent of how I react to it." -Charles Swindoll

6. "If you look at what you have in life, you'll always have more. If you look at what you don't have in life, you'll never have enough." -Oprah Winfrey

7. "Remember no one can make you feel inferior without your consent." -Eleanor Roosevelt

8. "I can't change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination." -Jimmy Dean

9. "Nothing is impossible, the word itself says 'I'm possible'!" -Audrey Hepburn

10. "To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart." -Eleanor Roosevelt

11. "Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears." -Les Brown

12. "Do or do not. There is no try." -Yoda

13. "Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve." -Napoleon Hill

14. "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do, so throw off the bowlines, sail away from safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." -Mark Twain

15. "I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed." -Michael Jordan

16. "Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value." -Albert Einstein

17. "I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions." -Stephen Covey

18. "When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it." -Henry Ford

19. "The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any." -Alice Walker

20. "The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity." -Amelia Earhart

21. "It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light." -Aristotle Onassis

22. "Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant." -Robert Louis Stevenson

23. "The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me." -Ayn Rand

24. "If you hear a voice within you say, 'You cannot paint,' then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced. -Vincent Van Gogh

25. "Build your own dreams, or someone else will hire you to build theirs." -Farrah Gray

26. "Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck." -Dalai Lama

27. "A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new." -Albert Einstein

28. "What's money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do." -Bob Dylan

29. "I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do." -Leonardo da Vinci

30. "When one door of happiness closes, another opens, but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us." -Helen Keller

31. "When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down 'happy.' They told me I didn't understand the assignment, and I told them they didn't understand life." -John Lennon

32. "The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be." -Ralph Waldo Emerson

33. "Everything you've ever wanted is on the other side of fear." -George Addair

34. "We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light." -Plato

35. "Nothing will work unless you do." -Maya Angelou

36. "Believe you can and you're halfway there." -Theodore Roosevelt

37. "What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality." -Plutarch

38. "Control your own destiny or someone else will." - Jack Welch

Did I miss any? Please share your favorite quotes for others to enjoy in the comments section.

Want to learn more from me? Check out my book, Emotional Intelligence 2.0.

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38 Of The Most Inspirational Leadership Quotes Ever - HuffPost