A man’s ego is the fountainhead of human progress.
A culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiate d masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.
Without property rights, no other rights are possible.
What greater wealth is there than to own your life and to spend it on growing? Every living thing must grow. It can’t stand still. It must grow or perish.
In a capitalist society, all human relationships are voluntary. Men are free to cooperate or not, to deal with one another or not, as their own individual judgments, convictions and interests dictate.
The freedom of speech of private individuals includes the right to not agree, not to listen, and not to finance one’s own antagonists.
I shall choose friends among men, but neither slaves nor masters. And I shall choose only such as please me, and them I shall love and respect, but neither command nor obey. And we shall join our hands when we wish, or walk alone when we so desire.
It is morally obscene to regard wealth as an anonymous, tribal product and to talk about ‘redistributing’ it.
Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.
A leash is a rope with a noose at both ends.
Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man’s only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.
The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it.
When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit.
The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap.
There are only two means by which men can deal with one another: guns or logic. Force or persuasion. Those who know that they cannot win by means of logic, have always resorted to guns.
Laissez-faire capitalism is the only social system based on the recognition of individual rights and, therefore, the only system that bans force from social relationships.
Upper classes are a nation’s past; the middle class is its future.
Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
In a free society, one does not have to deal with those who are irrational. One is free to avoid them.
Contrary to the ecologists, nature does not stand still and does not maintain the kind of equilibrium that guarantees the survival of any particular species – least of all the survival of her greatest and most fragile product: man.