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Faith and force are corollaries: every period of history dominated by mysticism, was a period of statism, of dictatorship, of tyranny.

Observe that in all the propaganda of the ecologists - amidst all their appeals to nature and pleas for "harmony with nature" there is no discussion of man's needs and the requirements of his survival. Man is treated as if he were an unnatural phenomenon.

A living entity that regarded its means of survival as evil, would not survive. A bird that fought to break its wings would not remain in existence for long. But the history of man has been a struggle to deny and to destroy his mind.

Fascism, Nazism, Communism and Socialism are only superficial variations of the same monstrous theme - collectivism.

A trader does not give the values of his spirit - his love, his friendship, his esteem - except in payment and in trade for human virtues, in payment for his own selfish pleasure, which he receives from men he can respect.

Man cannot survive in the kind of state of nature that the ecologists envision. In order to survive, man has to discover and produce everything he needs, which means that he has to alter his background and adapt it to his needs.

I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows.

There is a fundamental conviction which some people never acquire, some hold only in their youth, and a few hold to the end of their days - the conviction that ideas matter, that knowledge matters, that truth matters, that one's mind matters.

This, in every hour and every issue, is your basic moral choice: thinking or non-thinking, existence or non-existence, A or non-A, entity or zero.

The moral justification of capitalism does not lie in the altruist claim that it represents the best way to achieve the "common good". It lies in the fact that it's the only system consonant with man's rational nature & that its ruling principle is justice

Philosophy is the foundation of science; epistemology is the foundation of philosophy. It is with a new approach to epistemology that the rebirth of philosophy has to begin.

America's inner contradiction was the altruist-collectivist ethics. Altruism is incompatible with freedom, with capitalism and with individual rights. One cannot combine the pursuit of happiness with the moral status of a sacrificial animal.

Just as a man's actions are preceded and determined by some form of idea in his mind, so a society's existential conditions are preceded and determined by the ascendancy of a certain philosophy among those whose job is to deal with ideas.

Philosophy studies the fundamental nature of existence, of man, and of man’s relationship to existence.

The right to agree with others is not a problem in any society; the right to disagree is crucial. It is the institution of private property that protects the right to disagree and thus keeps the road open to man's most valuable attribute: the creative mind

Your moral appraisal is the coin paying men for their virtues or vices, and this payment demands of you as scrupulous an honor as you bring to financial transactions.

To think is an act of choice. The key to "human nature" is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness. Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct.

A moral commandment is a contradiction in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.

The small minority of adults who are unable rather than unwilling to work, have to rely on voluntary charity; misfortune is not a claim to slave labor; there is no such thing as the right to control those without whom one would be unable to survive.

Collectivism does not preach sacrifice as a temporary means to some desirable end. Sacrifice is its end--sacrifice as a way of life. It is man's independence, success, prosperity, and happiness that collectivists wish to destroy.

Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man's only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.

Don't bother to examine a folly--ask yourself only what it accomplishes.

Managerial work--the organization and integration of human effort into purposeful, large-scale, long-range activities--is, in the realm of action, what man's conceptual faculty is in the realm of cognition.

Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man's values, it has to be earned.

Moral cowardice is the fear of upholding the good because it is good, and fear of opposing the evil because it is evil.

Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life.

There can be no such thing as "consumer's rights," just as there can be no "rights" belonging to some special group or race and to no others. There are only the rights of man - rights possessed by every individual man and by all men as individuals.

When in doubt about the meaning or the definition of a concept, the best method of clarification is to look for its referents- - i.e., to ask oneself: What fact or facts of reality gave rise to this concept? What distinguishes it from all other concepts?

Intellectual honesty consists in taking ideas seriously. To take ideas seriously means that you intend to live by, to practice, any idea you accept as true.

A group, as such, has no rights. A man can neither acquire new rights by joining a group nor lose the rights which he does possess. The principle of individual rights is the only moral base of all groups or associations.