The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.

Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration.

At first, man was enslaved by the gods. But he broke their chains. Then he was enslaved by the kings. But he broke their chains. He was enslaved by his birth, by his kin, by...

The man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.

There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.

For our face and body were beautiful. Our face was not like the faces of our brothers, for we felt not pity when looking upon it. Our body was not like the bodies of our...

A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.

There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.

He tried to explain and to convince. He knew, while he spoke, that it was useless, because his words sounded as if they were hitting a vacuum. There was no such person as Mrs. Wayne...

Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live–that productive work is the process by which man’s consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and...

So you think that money is the root of all evil? […] Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods...

We, Equality 7-2521, were not happy in those year in the Home of the Students. It was not that the learning was too hard for us. It was that the learning was too easy. This...

But I don’t understand. Why do you want me to think that this is great architecture? He pointed to the picture of the Parthenon.That, said the Dean, is the Parthenon.- So it is.- I haven’t...

The age of the skyscraper is gone. This is the age of the housing project. Which is always a prelude to the age of the cave.

That’s your cruelty, that’s what’s mean and selfish about you. If you loved your brother, you’d give him a job he didn’t deserve, precisely because he didn’t deserve it–that would be true love and kindness...

Men who reject the responsibility of thought and reason can only exist as parasites on the thinking of others.

If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.

Do not ever say that the desire to ‘do good’ by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.

Fransisco, you’re some kind of very high nobility, aren’t you?” He answered, “Not yet. The reason my family has lasted for such a long time is that none of us has ever been permitted to...

My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose.

Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice. . . Man must obtain...

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artists metaphysical value judgments.

Then she understood that what she needed was the motion to a purpose, no matter how small or in what form, the sense of an activity going step by step to some chosen end across...

Honest people are never touchy about the matter of being trusted.

Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a...

No speech is ever considered, but only the speaker. It’s so much easier to pass judgement on a man than on an idea.

Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins.

People said it because other people said it. They did not know why it was being said and heard everywhere. They did not give or ask for reasons. ‘Reason,’ Dr. Pritchett had told them, ‘is...

I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how...

Whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man’s nature and of life’s potential.

For the coming of that day shall I fight, I and my sons and my chosen friends. For the freedom of Man. For his rights. For his life. For his honor.

Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men...

Those who grant sympathy to guilt, grant none to innocence.

We alone, of the thousands who walk this earth, we alone in this hour are doing a work which has no purpose save that we wish to do it.

Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result...

When I die, I hope to go to Heaven, whatever the Hell that is.

Why have you been staring at me ever since we met? Because I’m not the Gail Wynand you’d heard about. You see, I love you. And love is exception-making. If you were in love you’d...

Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?

Every form of happiness if one, every desire is driven by the same motor–by our love for a single value, for the highest potentiality of our own existence–and every achievement is an expression of it.

I often think that he’s the only one of us who’s achieved immortality. I don’t mean in the sense of fame and I don’t mean he won’t die someday. But he’s living it. I think...

She sat listening to the music. It was a symphony of triumph. The notes flowed up, they spoke of rising and they were the rising itself, they were the essence and the form of upward...

He needed the people and the clamour around him. There was no questions and no doubts when he stood on a platform over a sea of faces; the air was heavy, compact, saturated with a...

When the name of Gail Wynand became a threat in the publishing world, a group of newspaper owners took him aside-at a city charity affair which all had to attend-and reproached him for what they...

The ‘ pleasure’ of being drunk is obviously the pleasure of escaping from the responsibility of Consciousness.

Potentially, a government is the most dangerous threat to man’s rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.

Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men’s stupidity, but your talent to their reason.

Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

Do you know the hallmark of a second rater? It’s resentment of another man’s achievement. Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone’s work prove greater than their own – they have no inkling of...

In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.

Now take a human body. Why wouldn’t you like to see a human body with a curling tail with a crest of ostrich feathers at the end? And with ears shaped like acanthus leaves? It...