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Born September 24, 1966, Stefan Molyneux is an Irish-born Canadian philosopher, author, and podcaster who founded Freedomain Radio in 2004. With degrees in history from McGill University and the University of Toronto, Molyneux built a career in software before dedicating himself to philosophical discourse. His work explores themes of personal freedom, ethics, voluntaryism, and peaceful parenting. Author of several books including Universally Preferable Behaviour, Molyneux has generated extensive philosophical discussions through thousands of podcasts. His career demonstrates how digital platforms can democratize philosophical discourse and create global conversations about fundamental questions of human existence and ethics.
"We are creatures built on a house of cards of language."
11
"Evil ethicists are the holocaust of humanity; if philosophy can be the instant sunlight to their endless vampirism, it will save more lives than all the doctors who have ever lived."
9
"Deep pockets and empty hearts rule the world. We unleash them at our peril."
11
"There's a huge swath of humanity that has developed verbal abilities to extract resources from guilt-ridden people.They used to be priests, and now they're leftists."
10
"The expression of preferences is the essence of love."
8
"The major abscess in the mind is a lack of acknowledgement of evil."
9
"Government is a gun that shoots money at your enemy and blows up in your face."
12
"The whole purpose of propaganda is to make the obvious seem obscure, or offensive."
10
"We may not yet know the right way to go, but we should at least stop going in the wrong direction."
10
"When you go with first principles, a giant light goes off in what you think is a city and turns out to be an insane asylum."
9
"There is no key to open the heart of another - except curiosity."
13
"The true self is that which is in touch with reality. The false self is the aspects of your personality that are adapted to threats and no longer consciously recognizes either the adaptation or the threat."
10
"The paralysis of potential is essential to the manufacturing of victims."
10
"Self-manipulation is our medication. Mythology is our drug. The only cure is honesty."
9
"I refuse to let the standards of evil people chip away at my capacity for integrity."
16
"When people encounter the free market and they recoil or react negatively to it, they're merely confessing that voluntaryism, trade and negotiation are foreign and threatening to them, which tells you everything about how tragically they were raised."
11
"You look back in time to when there was slavery and you think 'how did people even remotely believe that this was a good idea?'.It's incomprehensible for us to think of what the mindset was 100 or 200 years ago. I hope to make the present as incomprehensible to the future as the past is to us."
7
"Guilt is a feeling that you owe a debt that you're not paying."
8
"Imagining that you are deep and complex, but others are simple, is one of the primary signs of malignant selfishness."
8
"There is no external solution to the problem of insecurity."
13
"Improving the world can be a nasty and ugly and difficult and dangerous business...because when you improve the world, you threaten the entrenched interests of evil people."
65
"Sanity is not about confrontation. It's about filtering. Having a stable and happy life is about saying "no" to crazy people, not about inviting them in and then hoping that confrontations are going to make them sane."
9
"All we think about in the cycle of violence is men. If we miss the oestrogen factor we cannot solve the cycle of violence. We cannot bring peace to the world unless we hold women accountable and morally responsible, particularly for their attacks upon children."
9
"It takes a huge amount of culture to normalize "crazy", and of course that's its main focus."
11
"Because the state uses violence to achieve its ends, and there is no rational end to the use of violence, states grow until they destroy civilized interactions through the corruption of money, contracts, honesty, family and self-reliance.No state in history has ever been contained.It's only taken a little more than a century for the US " founded on the idea of limited government, to break the bonds of the constitution, institute the income tax, take control of the money supply and the educational system and begin its catastrophic expansion."
14
"Rights" are something made up by governments to make you feel like you're buying something with your taxes."
9
"Those suffering from terminal falsehood seek out each other, like a drunk seeks out a wall so that he doesn't fall down."
9
"Applying parents values back to them allot of the time is like trying to pay back a guy who is a counterfeiter with his own counterfeit bills. "No, your supposed to think this is real money. I know it's not. I'm only pretending this is real money to get away with something. I don't actually want to receive it because I know it's fake money."
9
"It's been easier to convince people to hand over half their income, their children to war, and their freedoms in perpetuity, than to engage them in seriously considering how roads might function in the absence of taxation."
11
"The government is a giant logjam in the eternal river of human potential."
12
"I don't think it is a good mental health practice to fantasize that you know the infinite thoughts of imaginary entities."
10
"Forgiveness is created by the restitution of the abuser, of the wrongdoer. It is not something to be squeeeeeezed out of the victim in a further act of conscience-corrupting abuse."
60
"There's nothing lonelier than empty relationships. At least when you're alone you can be yourself, but when you're in empty relationships you can't even be yourself.You can be real alone, or you can be a ghost with false friends.Pulse proximity is not intimacy, and it's worse than no friends at all."
8
"Ever wonder why the media never refers to 18 or 19 year old American soldiers as "armed teens"?"
8
"You cannot connect with anyone except through reality."