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Do you know the hallmark of the second-rater? It's resentment of another man's achievement.

A sense of life is not a permanent endowment. The characteristically American one is being eroded daily all around us.

Serenity comes from the ability to say "Yes" to existence. Courage comes from the ability to say "No" to the wrong choices made by others.

To act against the facts of reality can result only in destruction.

Facts are the standard of truth or falsehood; it is by means of facts that we determine whether an idea of ours is true or false.

Romantic Realism.

I don't write about people as they are, but as they could be and should be.

I shall choose friends among men, but neither slaves nor masters.

All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys it is the evil.

My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists--and in a single choice: to live.

When personal judgment is inoperative (or forbidden), men's first concern is not how to choose, but how to justify their choice.

I do not place my moral sanction upon a murderer's wish to kill me.

In a free society, one does not have to deal with those who are irrational. One is free to avoid them.

A "whim" is a desire experienced by a person who does not know and does not care to discover its cause.

No advocate of reason can claim the right to establish his version of a good society, if such society includes the initiation of force against dissenters in any issue. No advocate of the free mind can claim the right to force the minds of others.

Dependence breeds hatred. Only free men can afford to be benevolent. Only free men can love and respect one another.

To hold one's own life as one's ultimate value, and one's own happiness as one's highest purpose are two aspects of the same achievement.

The principle of using force only in retaliation against those who initiate its use, is the principle of subordinating might to right.

I am opposed to martyrdom as well as to compromise: neither is ever necessary.

The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone.

To say 'I love you' one must first know how to say the 'I'.

From Plato's REPUBLIC onward, all statist-collectivists have looked longingly up at an ant hill as at a social ideal to be reached.

Men do have the capacity to work out their own destiny, the only obstacle that stops them is the interference of other men.

Any undertaking that involves more than one man, requires the voluntary consent of every participant.

Mankind's tragedy lies in the fact that the vicious moral code of altruism men have accepted destroys them by means of the best within them.

It is with the study of man---not of the loose aggregate known as a "community"---that any science of the humanities has to begin.

Emotions are inherent in your nature, but their content is dictated by your mind.

One of the most dangerous things a man can do is to surrender his moral autonomy to others.

An undefinable law is not a law, but merely a license for some men to rule others.

Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force.