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From his discovery that he has to make choices, man knows that his desperate need of self-esteem is a matter of life or death. As a being of volitional consciousness, he knows that he must know his own value in order to maintain his own life.

Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.

Freedom, in a political context, means freedom from government coercion. It does not mean freedom from the landlord, or freedom from the employer, or freedom from the laws of nature which do not provide men with automatic prosperity.

Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants: money will not give him a code of values, if he's evaded the knowledge of what to value and it will not provide him with a purpose if he's evaded the choice of what to seek.

Man is an indivisible entity, an integrated unit of two attributes: of matter and consciousness, and he may permit no breach between body and mind, between action and thought, between his life and his convictions.

Poverty is not a mortgage on the labor of others; Misfortune is not a mortgage on achievement; Failure is not a mortgage on success; Suffering is not a claim check, and its relief is not the goal of existence. Life is not one huge hospital.

Every form of causeless self-doubt, every feeling of inferiority and secret unworthiness is, in fact, man's hidden dread of his inability to deal with existence.

There is only one standard of justice in the field of economics: the verdict of a free market.

Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. Their goals differed, but they had in common the response they received - hatred.

Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by fraud.

Stillness is the antithesis of life. Life can be kept in existence only by a constant process of self-sustaining action. The goal of that action, the ultimate value which, to be kept, must be gained through its every movement, is the organism's life.

Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.

By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man--every man--is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.

"We know that we know nothing," they chatter, blanking out the fact that they are claiming knowledge--"There are no absolutes," they chatter, blanking out the fact that they are uttering an absolute.

Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction.

The businessman's tool is values; the bureaucrat's tool is fear.

Nothing is more contemptible than the willingness to pander to human stupidity and ignore human intelligence, regardless of the numerical preponderance of either at any given time.

There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism--by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide.

To withhold your contempt from men's vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement.

When your impartial attitude declares, in effect, that neither the good nor the evil may expect anything from you - whom do you betray and whom do you encourage?

A man is to be judged by the judgments he pronounces. The things which he condemns or extols exist in objective reality and are open to the independent appraisal of others.

The fact that most people are morally "gray" does not invalidate man's need of morality and of moral "whiteness"; if anything, it makes the need more urgent.

Man is not a lone wolf and he is not a social animal. He is a contractual animal. He has to plan his life long-range, make his own choices, and deal with other men by voluntary agreement.

In reality and in the Objectivist ethics, there is no such thing as "duty." There is only choice and the full, clear recognition of a principle obscured by the notion of "duty": the law of causality.

An emotion that clashes with your reason, an emotion that you cannot explain or control, is only the carcass of that stale thinking which you forbade your mind to revise.

The virtue involved in helping those one loves is not "selflessness" or "sacrifice," but integrity.

An artist does not fake reality - he stylizes it. He selects those aspects of existence which he regards as metaphysically significant - and by isolating and stressing them, by omitting the insignificant and accidental, he presents his view of existence.

Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice - and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal.

Happiness is the successful state of life, pain is an agent of death. Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values.

Men learn from one another. But all learning is only the exchange of material. No man can give another the capacity to think. Yet that capacity is our only means of survival.