
Variant: The end of a melody is not its goal: but nonetheless, had the melody not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable.
Source: Anthem
Variant: The end of a melody is not its goal: but nonetheless, had the melody not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable.
“Mankind ought to end its existence of its own will.”
Source: The Last Messiah (1933), To Be a Human Being https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4m6vvaY-Wo&t=1110s (1989–90)
The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self, 1984
“Nor is its influence by any means at an end”
Source: 2000s, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (2000), p. 223
Context: This remarkable address conveys, more than any other contemporary document, not only the soul of the Confederacy but also of that Jim Crow South that arose from the ashes of the Confederacy. From the end of Reconstruction until after World War II, the idea of racial inequality gripped the territory of the former Confederacy, and not only of the former Confederacy, more profoundly than it had done under slavery. Nor is its influence by any means at an end. Stephens's prophecy of the Confederacy's future resembles nothing so much as Hitler's prophecies of the Thousand-Year Reich. Nor are their theories very different. Stephens, unlike Hitler, spoke only of one particular race as inferior. But the principle of racial domination, once established, can easily be extended to fit the convenience of the self-anointed master race or class, whoever it may be.
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), III : The Hunger of Immortality
Context: The vain man is in like cause with the avaricious — he takes the mean for the end; forgetting the end he pursues the means for its own sake and goes no further. The seeming to be something, conducive to being it, ends by forming our objective. We need that others should believe in our superiority to them in order that we may believe in it ourselves, and upon their belief base our faith in our own persistence, or at least in the persistence of our fame. We are more grateful to him that congratulates us on the skill with which we defend a cause than we are to him who recognizes the truth or goodness of the cause itself. A rabid mania for originality is rife in the modern intellectual world and characterizes all individual effort. We would rather err with genius than hit the mark with the crowd.
Private journal (1858), quoted in Gertrude Himmelfarb, Lord Acton: A Study in Conscience and Politics (1952), p. 40
The Ayn Rand Column ‘Introducing Objectivism’
“Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.”
“Happiness is the meaning and purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.”
Source: The Happiness Project: Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun