1. “Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.”
2. “A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.”
3. “A crime is the violation of the right(s) of other men by force (or fraud). It is only the initiation of physical force against others- i.e., the recourse to violence- that can be classified as a crime in a free society (as distinguished from a civil wrong). Ideas, in a free society, are not a crime- and neither can they serve as the justification of a crime.”
4. “A desire presupposes the possibility of action to achieve it; action presupposes a goal which is worth achieving.”
5. “A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race - and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin.”
6. “A living entity that regarded its means of survival as evil, would not survive. A plant that struggled to mangle its roots, a bird that fought to break its wings would not remain for long in the existence they affronted. But the history of man has been a struggle to deny and destroy his mind.”
7. “All work is an act of philosophy.”
8. “...and we must consider...that since -- unfortunately -- we are forced to live together, the most important thing for us to remember is that the only way in which we can have any law at all is to have as little of it as possible. I see no ethical standard by which to measure the whole unethical conception of a State, except in the amount of time, of thought, of money, of effort and of obedience, which a society extorts from its every member. Its value and its civilization are in inverse ratio to that extortion. There is no conceivable law by which a man can be forced to work on any terms except those he chooses to set. There is no conceivable law to prevent him from setting them -- just as there is none to force his employer to accept them. The freedom to agree or disagree is the foundation of our kind of society...”
9. “Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.”
10. “A "whim" is a desire experienced by a person who does not know and does not care to discover its cause.”
11. “Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.”
12. “Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.”
13. “Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration.”
14. “Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle.The world you desired can be won. It exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.”
15. “Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive.”
16. “Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice.”
17. “Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where the gun begins.”
18. “Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values.”
19. “He liked to observe emotions; they were like red lanterns strung along the dark unknown of another's personality, marking vulnerable points.”
20. “If there is any one proof of a man's incompetence, it is the stagnant mentality of a worker who, doing some small routine job in a vast undertaking, does not care to look beyond the lever of a machine, does not choose to know how the machine got there or what makes his job possible, and proclaims that the management of the undertaking is parasitical and unneccessary.”
21. “If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater the effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders -- what would you tell him to do? I...don't know. What...could he do? What would you tell him?”
22. “I like to see a man standing at the foot of a skyscraper. It makes him no bigger than an ant -- isn't that the correct bromide for the occasion? The God-damn fools! It's the man who made it -- the whole incredible mass of stone and steel. It doesn't dwarf him, it makes him greater than the structure. It reveals his true dimensions to the world.”
23. “I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.”
24. “It does take an exceptional mind and a still more exceptional integrity to remain untouched by the brain-destroying influences of the world's doctrines, the accumulated evil of centuries -- to remain human, since the human is the rational.... Those who cry loudest about their disillusionment, about the failure of virtue, the futility of reason, the impotence of logic -- are those who have achieved the full, exact, logical result of the ideas that they preached.... In such a world, the best have to turn against society and have to become its deadliest enemies.... What complaint do they now have to make? That the universe is irrational? Is it?”
25. “It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there's someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.”
26. “It does take an exceptional mind and a still more exceptional integrity to remain untouched by the brain-destroying influences of the world's doctrines, the accumulated evil of centuries -- to remain human, since the human is the rational.... Those who cry loudest about their disillusionment, about the failure of virtue, the futility of reason, the impotence of logic -- are those who have achieved the full, exact, logical result of the ideas that they preached.... In such a world, the best have to turn against society and have to become its deadliest enemies.... What complaint do they now have to make? That the universe is irrational? Is it?”
27. “Live a life as a monument to your soul.”
28. "Love is an expression and assertion of self-esteem, a response to one's own values in the person of another. One gains a profoundly personal, selfish joy from the mere existence of the person one loves. It is one's own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns, and derives from love."
29. “Men have been taught that it is a virtue to agree with others. But the creator is the man who disagrees. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to swim with the current. But the creator is the man who goes against the current. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to stand together. But the creator is the man who stands alone.”
30. “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.”
31. “Neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as a man is free to attempt to survive by any random means, as a parasite, a moocher or a looter, but not free to succeed at it beyond the range of the moment - so he is free to seek his happiness in any irrational fraud, any whim, any delusion, any mindless escape from reality, but not free to succeed at it beyond the range of the moment not to escape the consequences.”
32. “No, you can't ruin an architect by proving that he's a bad architect. But you can ruin him because he's an atheist, or because somebody sued him, or because he slept with some woman, or because he pulls wings off bottleflies. You'll say it doesn't make sense? Of course it doesn't. That's why it works. Reason can be fought with reason. How are you going to fight the unreasonable? The trouble with you, my dear, and with most people, is that you don't have sufficient respect for the senseless. The senseless is the major factor in our lives. You have no chance if it is your enemy. But if you can make it become your ally -- ah, my dear!”
33. “Pity for the guilty is treason to the innocent.”
34. “Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lot of an empty mind.”
35. “Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone.”
36. “So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of all money?”
37. “Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life.”
38. “The action required to sustain human life is primarily intellectual: everything man needs has to be discovered by his mind and produced by his effort.”
39. “The basic need of the creator is independence. The reasoning mind cannot work under any form of compulsion. It cannot be curbed, sacrificed or subordinated to any consideration whatsoever. It demands total independence in function and in motive. To a creator, all relations with men are secondary.”
40. "The common good of a collective -- a race, a class, a state -- was the claim and justification of every tyranny ever established over men. Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equaled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism? Does the fault lie in men's hypocrisy or in the nature of the principle? The most dreadful butchers were the most sincere. The believed in the perfect society reached through the guillotine and the firing squad. Nobody questioned their right to murder since they were murdering for an altruistic purpose. It was accepted that man must be sacrificed for other men. Actors change, but the course of the tragedy remains the same. A humanitarian who starts with the declarations of love for mankind and ends with a sea of blood. It goes on and will go on so long as men believe that an action is good if it is unselfish. That permits the altruist to act and forces his victims to bear it. The leaders of collectivist movements ask nothing of themselves. But observe the results."
41. “The desire not to be anything is the desire not to be.”
42. “The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see.”
43. “The idea that 'the public interest' supersedes private interests and rights can have but one meaning: that the interests and rights of some individuals take precedence over the interests and rights of others.”
44. “The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap.”
45. “The men who are not interested in philosophy need it the most urgently; they are the most helplessly in its power.”
46. “The only purpose of education is to teach a student how to live his life-by developing his mind and equipping him to deal with reality. The training he needs is theoretical, i.e., conceptual. He has to be taught to think, to understand, to integrate, to prove. He has to be taught the essentials of the knowledge discovered in the past-and he has to be equipped to acquire further knowledge by his own effort.”
47. “The mind leads, the emotions follow.”
48. “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.”
49. “There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. ... When men reduce their virtues to the approximate, then evil acquires the force of an absolute.”
50. “There can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob.”
51. “There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.”
52. “There is nothing to take a man's freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers.”
53. “There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. When there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.”
54. “The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide -- as, I think, he will. Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips, and guns -- or dollars. Take your choice -- there is no other -- and your time is running out.”
55. “The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.”
56. "Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision."
57. “Thinking men cannot be ruled.”
58. “To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one's thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one's mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.”
59. “To deal with men by force is as impractical as to deal with nature by persuasion.”
60. “To know one's own desires, their meaning and their costs requires the highest human virtue: rationality.”
61. “Unjust laws have to be fought ideologically; they cannot be fought or corrected by means of mere disobedience and futile martyrdom.”
62. “Volumes can be and have been written about the issue of freedom versus dictatorship, but, in essence, it comes down to a single question: do you consider it moral to treat men as sacrificial animals and to rule them by physical force?”
63. "We are born into this world unarmed --- our mind is our only weapon."
64. “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.”
65. “When I die, I hope to go to Heaven, whatever the Hell that is.”
66. “Whether you know the shape of a pebble or the structure of a solar system, the axioms remain the same: that it exists and that you know it.”
67. “Words are a lens to focus one's mind.”
