Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion... when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice – you may know that your society is doomed.
No hay nada que pueda arrebatar a un hombre su libertad, salvo otros hombres.
We do not tell – we show. We do not claim – we prove.
You have been paying blackmail, not for your vices, but for your virtues.
You will not enter it until you learn that you do not need to convince or to conquer the world. When you learn it, you will see that through all the years of your struggle, nothing had barred you from Atlantis and there were no chains to hold you, except the chains you were willing to wear. Through all those years, that which you most wished to win was waiting for you... waiting as unremittingly as you were fighting, as passionately, as desperately – but with a greater certainty than yours.
I do not care to be admired causelessly, emotionally, intuitively, instinctively – or blindly. I do not care for blindness in any form, I have too much to show – or for deafness, I have too much to say. I do not care to be admired by anyone’s heart – only by someone’s head.
For once, she expected some emotion from him; and an emotion would be the equivalent of seeing him broken. She did not know what it was about him that had always made her want to see him broken.
When you suspend your faculty of independent judgment, you suspend consciousness. To stop consciousness is to stop life.
What is my joy if all hands, even the unclean, can reach into it? What is my wisdom, if even the fools can dictate to me?
All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys it is the evil.
His face was like a law of nature – a thing one could not question, alter or implore. It had high cheekbones over gaunt, hollow cheeks; gray eyes, cold and steady; a contemptuous mouth, shut tight, the mouth of an executioner or a saint.
He’s paying the price and wondering for what sin and telling himself that he’s been too selfish. In what act or thought of his has there ever been a self? What was his aim in life? Greatness – in other people’s eyes. Fame, admiration, envy – all that which comes from others. Others dictated his convictions, which he did not hold, but he was satisfied that others believed he held them. Others were his motive power and his prime concern. He didn’t want to be great, but to be thought great.
That love is reverence, and worship, and glory, and the upward glance. Not a bandage for dirty sores. But they don’t know it. Those who speak of love most promiscuously are the ones who’ve never felt it. They make some sort of feeble stew out of sympathy, compassion, contempt and general indifference, and they call it love.
For three years, ever since he had lived in Stanton, he had come here for his only relaxation, to swim, to rest, to think, to be alone and alive, whenever he could find one hour to spare, which had not been often. In his new freedom the first thing he had wanted to do was to come here, because he knew that he was coming for the last time.
No, justice has not ceased to exist. How could it? It is possible for men to abandon their sight of it, and then it is justice that destroys them. But it is not possible for justice to go out of existence, because one is an attribute of the other, because justice is the act of acknowledging that which exists.
He borrowed from others in order to make an impression on others. There’s your actual selflessness. It’s his ego that he’s betrayed and given up. But everybody calls him selfish.
It is forbidden, not to be happy. For, as it has been explained to us, men are free and the earth belongs to them; and all things on earth belong to all men; and the will of all men together is good for all; and so all men must be happy. Yet.
Man’s life, as required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless brute, of a looting thug or a mooching mystic, but the life of a thinking being – not life by means of force or fraud, but life by means of achievement – not survival at any price, since there’s only one price that pays for man’s survival: reason.
Humanity’s darkest evil, the most destructive horror machine among all the devices of men, is non-objective law...
The weather seemed afraid to take a stand and clung noncommittally to some sort of road’s middle; Board of Directors’ weather, she thought.