It is easier to donate a few thousand to charity and think oneself noble than to base self-respect on personal standards of personal achievement.
Any group or “collective”, large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members.
Errors of knowledge are not breaches of morality; no proper moral code can demand infallibility or omniscience.
Litigants obey the verdict of a tribunal solely on the premise that there is an objective rule of conduct, which they both accept.
One must never fail to pronounce moral judgment.
Parties are intended to be celebrations, and celebrations should be only for those who have something to celebrate.
Style is not an end in itself, it is only a means to an end – the means of telling a story.
The genius must have his freedom and his independence.
The men who attempt to survive, not by means of reason, but by means of force, are attempting to survive by the method of animals.
The writer who develops a beautiful style, but has nothing to say, represents a kind of arrested esthetic development; he is like a pianist who acquires a brilliant technique by playing finger-exercises, but never gives a concert.
Life is the reward of virtue. And happiness is the goal and reward of life.
A society without intellectuals is like a body without a head.
All the evils, abuses, and iniquities, popularly ascribed to businessmen and to capitalism, were not caused by an unregulated economy or by a free market, but by government intervention into the economy.
Capitalism is based on individual rights – not on the sacrifice of the individual to the ‘public good’ of the collective.
If a society is to be free, its government has to be controlled.
Government holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force.
Romantic art is the fuel and the spark plug of a Man’s soul. It’s task is to set a soul on fire and never let it go out.
It’s a rare gift, you know, to feel reverence for your own life and to want the best, the greatest, the highest possible, here, now, for your very own.
There is no such thing as duty. If you know that a thing is right, you want to do it. If you don’t want to do it – it isn’t right. If it’s right and you don’t want to do it – you don’t know what right is and you’re not a man.
It’s the hardest thing in the world – to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kinds of courage.