I could die for you. But I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, live for you.

We are born into this world unarmed – our mind is our only weapon.

Learn to distinguish the difference between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality. An error of knowledge is not a moral flaw, provided you are willing to correct it; only a mystic would judge human beings by the standard of an impossible, automatic omniscience. But a breach of morality is the conscious choice of an...

This box is useless,” said Alliance 6-7349.Should it be what they claim of it,” said Harmony 9-2642, “then it would bring ruin to the Department of Candles.

For the “We” must never be spoken, save by one’s choice and as a second thought. This word must never be placed first within a man’s soul, else it becomes a monster, the root of all evils on earth, the root of man’s torture by men, and an unspeakable lie.

People don’t want to think. And the deeper they get into trouble, the less they want to think. But by some sort of instinct, they feel that they ought to and it makes them feel guilty. So they’ll bless and follow anyone who gives them a justification for not thinking. Anyone who makes a virtue...

If I found a job, a project, an idea or a person I wanted-I’d have to depend on the whole world. Everything has strings leading to everything else. We’re all so tied together. We’re all in a net, the net is waiting and it’s precious to you. Do you know who is standing ready to...

Government ‘help’ to business is just as disastrous as government persecution… the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off.

Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.

Everyone has the right to make his own decisions, but none has the right to force his decision on others.

And what, incidentally, do you think integrity is? The ability not to pick a watch out of your neighbor’s pocket? No, it’s not as easy as that. If that were all, I’d say ninety-five percent of humanity were honest, upright men. Only, as you can see, they aren’t. Integrity is the ability to stand by...

Contrary to the ecologists, nature does not stand still and does not maintain the kind of equilibrium that guarantees the survival of any particular species – least of all the survival of her greatest and most fragile product: man.

You love your work. God help you, you love it! And thats the curse. That’s the brand on your forehead for all of them to see. You love it and they know it, and they know they have you. Do you ever look at the people in the street? Aren’t you afraid of them? I...

Love should be treated like a business deal, but every business deal has its own terms and its own currency. And in love, the currency is virtue. You love people not for what you do for them or what they do for you. You love them for the values, the virtues, which they have achieved...

A desire presupposes the possibility of action to achieve it; action presupposes a goal that is worth achieving.

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

We fell, but we never let the box fall from our hands. Then we ran. We ran blindly, and men and houses streaked past us in a torrent without shape.

Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting for us in our graves – or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.

There was still one response, the greatest, that she had missed. She thought: To find a feeling that would hold, as their sum, as their final expression, the purpose of all the things she loved on earth… To find a consciousness like her own, who would be the meaning of her world, as she would...

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 evil?

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 end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose. Neither am I the means...

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 the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.

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 who boasts that his great-grandfather was an empire-builder, or the small-town spinster who boasts that her maternal great-uncle was a...

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. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really 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 what a person finds sexually attractive and I will tell you their entire philosophy of life. Show me the person...

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 property – then it is an outlaw who has to become a policeman.

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, or is there a line to divide these two?

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 I’m alive? Because I have a stomach and eat and digest the food? Because I breathe and work and produce...

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 grey of it. It is the word by which the depraved steal the virtue of the good, by which 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 your face with the greatest of pleasure.

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 goal they cannot grasp and demanding that they reshape their souls in its image, thus leaving them with a burden...

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