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The right to the pursuit of happiness means that a man has the right to take the actions he deems necessary to achieve his happiness; it does not mean that others must make him happy.

Rights are a moral concept that provides a logical transition from the principles guiding an individual's actions to the principles guiding his relationship with others - the concept that preserves and protects individual morality in a social context.

Those who reject collectivism are radicals in the proper sense: "radical" means "fundamental." Today, the fighters for capitalism have to be, not bankrupt "conservatives," but new radicals, new intellectuals and, above all, new dedicated moralists.

The law of causality is the law of identity applied to action. All actions are caused by entities. The nature of an action is caused and determined by the nature of the entities that act; a thing cannot act in contradiction to its nature.

The doctrine that "human rights" are superior to "property rights" simply means that some human beings have the right to make property out of others. Whoever regards this as human and right, has no right to the title of "human".

There is no honest revolt against reason.

The law of identity does not permit you to have your cake and eat it, too. The law of causality does not permit you to eat your cake before you have it.

The capacity for unclouded enjoyment, she thought, does not belong to irresponsible fools; an inviolate peace of spirit is not the achievement of a drifter; to be able to laugh like that is the end result of the most profound, most solemn thinking.

One learns from Romantic art the experience of looking up to a hero - a view of life motivated and dominated by values, a life in which man's choices are practicable, effective and crucially important - that is, a moral sense of life.

Reality is that which exists; the unreal does not exist, the unreal is merely that negation of existence which is the content of a human consciousness when it attempts to abandon reason.

A rational mind does not work under compulsion; it does not subordinate its grasp of reality to anyone's orders, directives, or controls; it does not sacrifice its knowledge, its view of the truth, to anyone's opinions, threats, wishes, plans, or welfare.

A rational mind may be hampered by others, it may be silenced, proscribed, imprisoned, or destroyed; it cannot be forced; a gun is not an argument.

There comes a point, in the defeat of any man of virtue, when his own consent is needed for evil to win - and that no manner of injury done to him by others can succeed if he chooses to withhold his consent.

The word "We" must never be spoken, save by one's choice and as a second thought. This word must never be placed first within man's soul, else it becomes a monster, the root of all evils on earth, the root of man's torture by men, and of an unspeakable lie

Reason is the only means of communication among men, and an objectively perceivable reality is their only common frame of reference; when these are held to be irrelevant in the field of morality, force becomes men's only way of dealing with one another.

Life is the reward of virtue and happiness is the goal and the reward of life.

His own happiness is man's only moral purpose, but only his own virtue can achieve it. Virtue is not an end in itself. Virtue is not its own reward or sacrificial fodder for the reward of evil.

I saw that the enemy was an inverted morality and that my sanction was its only power. I saw that evil was impotent - that evil was the irrational, the blind, the anti-real & that the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it.

Do not hide behind such superficialities as whether you should or should not give a dime to a beggar. The issue is whether you must keep buying your life, dime by dime, from any beggar who might choose to approach you.

When men reduce their virtues to the approximate, then evil acquires the force of an absolute, when loyalty to an unyielding purpose is dropped by the virtuous, it's picked up by scoundrels.

Capitalism did not create poverty - it inherited it. Compared to the centuries of pre-capitalist starvation, the living conditions of the poor in the early years of capitalism were the first chance the poor ever had to survive.

No man can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation, an unrewarded duty or an involuntary servitude on another man. There can be no such thing as the right to enslave.

Instead of teaching children respect for one another's individuality, achievements and rights, Progressive education gives an official stamp of moral righteousness to the tendency of frightened half-savages to gang up on one another.

In art, and in literature, the end and the means, or the subject and the style, must be worthy of each other. That which is not worth contemplating in life, is not worth re-creating in art.

The mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought. An agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise or an average drawn upon many individual thoughts.

The root of production is man's mind; the mind is an attribute of the individual and it does not work under orders, controls and compulsion, as centuries of stagnation have demonstrated.

Wealth is the product of man's intellect, of his creative ability, fully as much as is art, science, philosophy or any other human power.

When you clamor for public ownership of the means of production, you are clamoring for public ownership of the mind.

Productivity is the process by which consciousness controls one's existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one's purpose, of translating an idea into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one's values.

When opposite basic principles are clearly and openly defined, it works to the advantage of the rational side; when they are not clearly defined, but are hidden or evaded, it works to the advantage of the irrational side.