Fitless Flights

X) Short aphorisms do no more than describe readily evident truths, and one simply agrees or disagrees with them. Real philosophy and fiction requires true thought.

J) Characters in fiction should be likable, but not too likable.

U) One cannot feel guilty when writing for a select few individuals. Someone who says otherwise does not realize that each mind is not soothed by the same therapy, though each body of ours may be (but even this is questionable).

RE) I will be glad if I have left this world without harming anyone. Death and temporality are distressing things, and no one faces them in triumph - there is only resignation, peace, or forgetfulness. I don't know what I would do if I knew certainly that the human race would become extinct. I would try to forget - that is all I could do.

D) The fallacy-laced hate speech of Randians has thus far only served to undermine their monochromed stance of moral impurity that catches itself in a tepid cycle of puerile self-aggrandization whose only marked victories consist in the continual ear-boxing of archaic straw-mans, and what's more, they are straw-mans that don't even even have the dignity to appeal to those well-steeped within the western tradition of philosophy and literature, but rather they stand outside the tradition and cause the ear-boxers to appear paradoxically prehistorical (and ultimately, primitive) in their claims. The intelligence to identify these paradoxes in a justificatory manner does nothing to reduce their barbarism (see Rand's preface to "The Virtue of Selfishness").