Rationality is the recognition of the fact that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it.
I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle.
Anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today.
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.
My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
If I am walking with two other men, each of them will serve as my teacher. I will pick out the good points of the one and imitate them, and the bad points of the other and correct them in myself.
Faced with what is right, to leave it undone shows a lack of courage.
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain – and most fools do. But it takes character and self control to be understanding and forgiving.
The journey is what brings us happiness, not the destination.
The superior man is slow in his words and earnest in his conduct.
Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.
There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.
It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.
Books are the training weights of the mind.
If you wish to be a writer, write.
Freedom is the only worthy goal in life. It is won by disregarding things that lie beyond our control. Stop aspiring to be anyone other than your own best self: for that does fall within your control.
Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems.