I never found beauty in longing for the impossible and never found the possible to be beyond my reach.

If that which we have found is the corruption of solitude, then what can men wish for save corruption? If this is the great evil of being alone, than what is good and what is...

If this is vise I want no virtue….I know what happiness is possible to me on earth. And my happiness needs no higher aim to vindicate it. My happiness is not the means to any...

No” to the wrong choices made by others.

What is kinder–to believe the best of people and burden them with a nobility beyond their endurance–or to see them as they are, and accept it because it makes them comfortable?

But why should you care what people will say? All you have to do is please yourself.

We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of...

Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth, the man who would make his fortune no matter where he started.

The respectable family that supports worthless relatives or covers up their crimes in order to “protect the family name”(as if the moral stature of one man could be damaged by the actions of another)-the bum...

Why do they always teach us that it’s easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It’s the hardest thing in the world–to do what we want....

A moment or an eternity—did it matter? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist.

Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.

Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. But, in fact, a person’s sexual choice is the result and sum of their fundamental convictions. Tell me...

It is a policeman’s duty to retrieve stolen property and return it to its owners. But when robbery becomes the purpose of the law, and the policeman’s duty becomes, not protection, but the plunder of...

At a time like this, we can’t afford the luxury of thinking!

For this wire is as a part of our body, as a vein torn from us, glowing with our blood. Are we proud of this thread of metal, or of our hands which made it,...

I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

Rights are not a matter of numbers – and there can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob.

We knew not where we were going. We only knew that we must run, run to the end of the world, run to the end of our days.

Never ask people. Not about your work. Don’t you know what you want? How can you stand it, not to know?

Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade…

Keating stood still, because he understood for the first time what it was that artists spoke about when they spoke of beauty.

When you are asked to love everybody indiscriminately, that is to love people without any standard, to love them regardless of whether they have any value or virtue, you are asked to love nobody.

The desire not to be anything is the desire not to be.

Now look at me! Take a good look! I was born and I knew I was alive and I knew what I wanted. What do you think is alive in me? Why do you think...

The word “We” is as lime poured over men, which sets and hardens to stone, and crushes all beneath it, and that which is white and that which is black are lost equally in the...

The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap.

I don’t want to see you. I don’t like you. I don’t like your face. You look like an insufferable egotist. You’re impertinent. You’re too sure of yourself. Twenty years ago I would have punched...

I think, therefore I’ll think.

Hence the sterile, uninspiring futility of a great many theoretical discussions of ethics, and the resentment which many people feel towards such discussions: moral principles remain in their minds as floating abstractions, offering them a...

I understood that centuries of chains and lashes will not kill the spirit of man nor the sense of truth within him.

He walked, groping for a sentence that hung in his mind as an empty shape. He could neither fill it or dismiss it.

There’s nothing as significant as a human face. Nor as eloquent. We can never really know another person, except by our first glance at him. Because, in that glance, we know everything. Even though we’re...

Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone’s work prove greater than their own – they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal –...

Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice.

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 keep the results, which means: the right of...

The question of whether one alleges the Superiority or Inferiority of any given race is irrelevant; racism has only one psychological root: the racist’s sense of his own Inferiority.

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.

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,...

Every dictator is a mystic, and every mystic is a potential dictator. A mystic craves obedience from men, not their agreement. He wants them to surrender their consciousness to his assertions, his edicts, his wishes,...

She tried to tear herself away from him. The effort broke against his arms that had not felt it. Her fists beat against his shoulders, against his face. He moved one had, took her two...

Stand here, he thought, and count the lighted windows of a city. You cannot do it. But behind each yellow rectangle that climbs, one over another, to the sky – under each bulb – down...

You are an unusual, brilliant child who has not seen enough of life to grasp the full measure of human stupidity.

We have lied to ourselves. We have not built this box for the good of our brothers. We built it for its own sake. It is above all our brothers to us, and its truth...

It only stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there’s service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves...

I love doing it. Every building is like a person. Single and unrepeatable.

May knowledge come to us! What is this secret our heart has understood and yet will not reveal to us, although it seems to beat as if it were endeavoring to tell it?

People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies,...

Aristotle may be regarded as the cultural barometer of Western history. Whenever his influence dominated the scene, it paved the way for one of history’s brilliant eras; whenever it fell, so did mankind.

Art is inextricably tied to man’s survival – not to his physical survival, but to that on which his physical survival depends: to the preservation and survival of his consciousness.