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

The basic need of the creator is independence.

If a society is to be free, its government has to be controlled.

Freedom is to ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.

Capitalism has been called a system of greed.

The source of the government’s authority is “the consent of the governed.

Never think of pain or danger or enemies a moment longer than is necessary to fight them.

Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human life.

If you don’t know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn.

I don’t wish to be the symbol of anything. I’m only myself.

To deal with men by force is as impractical as to deal with nature by persuasion.

Do not keep silent when your own ideas and values are being attacked.

Learn to value yourself, which means: fight for your happiness.

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

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.

Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter.

Identify the dominant philosophy of a society and you can predict its future.

To be rather than to seem.

With attachment all that seems to exist is just me & that object I desire.

As far as the laws of existence are concerned, there is no good and bad, no crime and punishment. It is just that for every action, there is a consequence.

Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world.

Only within metaphysics does logic exist.

The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.

But I must at the very beginning lay down this principle – friendship can only exist between good men.

Being is essentially different from a being, from beings.