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No coercive monopoly has ever been or ever can be established on a free market. Every coercive monopoly was created by government intervention into the economy: by special privileges which closed the entry of competitors into a given field.

Competition is a by-product of productive work, not its goal. A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.

One does not have to be omniscient in order to possess knowledge; one merely has to know that which one does know, and distinguish it from that which one feels.

The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, to settle disputes.

Free speech does not demand that private citizens provide a microphone for the man who advocates their destruction, or a passkey for the burglar who wants to seize their property, or a knife for the murderer who intends to cut their throats.

Since knowledge, thinking, and rational action are properties of the individual, man's survival requires that those who think be free of the interference of those who don't. Freedom is the fundamental requirement of man's mind.

A rational process is a moral process. If devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.

Give a moment's silent thanks every time you use one of the labor- and, therefore, time - and, therefore, lifesaving devices created for you by technology.

Humor is not an unconditional virtue; its moral character depends on its object. To laugh at the contemptible, is a virtue; to laugh at the good, is a hideous vice. Too often, humor is used as the camouflage of moral cowardice.

Wittgenstein's theory that a concept refers to a conglomeration of things vaguely tied together by a "family resemblance" is a perfect description of the state of a mind out of focus.

The precept: "Judge not, that ye be no judged" is an abdication of moral responsibility: it is a moral blank check one gives to others in exchange for a moral blank check one expects for oneself.

After centuries of being pounded with the doctrine that altruism is the ultimate ideal, men have accepted it in the only way it could be accepted. By seeking self-esteem through others. By living second-hand. And it opened the way for every kind of horror.

Life or death is man's only fundamental alternative. To live is his basic act of choice. If he chooses to live, a rational ethics will tell him what principles of action are required to implement his choice.

If he does not choose to live, nature will take its course.

Just as man can't exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one's rights into reality - to think, to work and to keep the results - which means: the right of property.

Intellectual honesty involves knowing what one does know, constantly expanding one's knowledge, and never evading or failing to correct a contradiction. This means: the development of an active mind as a permanent attribute.

The tribal notion of "the common good" has served as the moral justification of most social systems and of all tyrannies in history. The degree of a society's enslavement or freedom corresponded to the degree to which that slogan was invoked or ignored.

An error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error.

Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; A free mind and a free market are corollaries.

Altruism cannot permit a recognition of virtue; it cannot permit self-esteem or moral innocence. Guilt is altruism's stock in trade, and the inducing of guilt is its only means of self-perpetuation.

An attempt to gain a value by deceiving the mind of others is an act of raising your victims to a position higher than reality, where you become a pawn of their blindness, a slave of their non-thinking and their evasions.

As there can be no causeless wealth, so there can be no causeless love. An emotion is a response to a fact of reality, an estimate dictated by your standards. To love is to value.

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. Production is the application of reason to the problem of survival.

The economic value of a man's work is determined, on a free market, by a single principle: by the voluntary consent of those who are willing to trade him their work or products in return. This is the moral meaning of the law of supply and demand.

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.

So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another - their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.

You are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival - so that for you, who are a human being, the question "to be or not to be" is the question "to think or not to think."

If men identified introspectively their inner states one tenth as correctly as they identified objective reality, we would be a race of ideal giants.

There are no conflicts of interest among rational men, men who do not desire the unearned and do not view one another with a cannibal's lust. Men who neither make sacrifices nor accept them.

The advocates of collectivism are motivated not by a desire for men's happiness, but by hatred for man, hatred of the good for being the good; The focus of that hatred, the target of its passionate fury, is the man of ability.