The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.
I am interested in politics only in order to secure and protect freedom.
The charming aspect of Christmas is the fact that it expresses good will in a cheerful, happy, benevolent, non-sacrificial way.
Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality. But existence exists; reality is not to be wiped out, it will merely wipe out the wiper.
No man can use his brain to think for another.
A man’s rights are not violated by a private individual’s refusal to deal with him.
The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word ‘selfishness’ is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual ‘package-deal,’ which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind.
Collectivism, as an intellectual power and a moral ideal, is dead. But freedom and individualism, and their political expression, capitalism, have not yet been discovered.
Don’t ever give up what you want in life. The struggle is worth it.
Guilt is altruism’s stock in trade, and the inducing of guilt is its only means of self-perpetuati on.
We the Living is not a novel ‘about Soviet Russia.’ It is a novel about Man against the State. Its basic theme is the sanctity of human life – using the word ‘sanctity’ not in a mystical sense, but in the sense of ‘supreme value.’
Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value.
Whatever road I take, the guiding star is within me; the guiding star and the loadstone which point the way. They point in but one direction. They point to me.
For they have nothing to fight me with, save the brute force of their numbers. I have my mind.
Freedom of association includes the freedom not to associate.
Learn to distinguish the difference between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality.
There are no little people in America. There are only people, equal before the law, yearning to breathe free and wanting to achieve the best within them.
Capitalism has been called nationalistic – yet it is the only system that banished ethnicity, and made it possible, in the United States, for men of various, formerly antagonistic nationalities to live together in peace.
Sacrifice does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious.
What is a demanding pleasure that demands the use of ones mind! Not in the sense of problem solving, but in the sense of exercising discrimination, judgment, awareness.