Quote collection
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"I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows."
"All work is an act of philosophy."
"The mind is the attribute of man. When man is born, he comes into existence with only one weapon with him--The reasoning mind."
"I take no pride in hopeless longing; I wouldn't hold a stillborn aspiration. I'd want to have it, to make it, to live it."
"Joy is the goal of existence, and joy is not to be stumbled upon, but to be achieved, and the act of treason is to let its vision drown in the swamp of the moment's torture."
"I could die for you. But I couldn't, and wouldn't, live for you."
"Those who tell you that man is unable to perceive a reality undistorted by his senses, mean that they are unwilling to perceive a reality undistorted by their feelings. "Things as they are" are things as perceived by your mind; divorce them from reason and they become "things as perceived by your wishes."
"God... a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive."
"Productive work is the central purpose of a rational man's life, the central value that integrates and determines the hierarchy of all his other values. Reason is the source, the precondition of his productive work, pride is the result."
"We are on strike against martyrdom—and against the moral code that demands it. We are on strike against those who believe that one man must exist for the sake of another. We are on strike against the morality of cannibals, be it practiced in body or in spirit. We will not deal with men on any terms but ours—and our terms are a moral code which holds that man is an end in himself and not the means to any end of others."
"A desire presupposes the possibility of action to achieve it; action presupposes a goal which is worth achieving."
"Man is a being with free will; therefore, each man is potentially good or evil, and it's up to him and only him (through his reasoning mind) to decide which he wants to be."
"The quickest way to kill the human spirit is to ask someone to do mediocre work."
"If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing."
"Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law."
"A reader has to be concerned only with the end result; unless he chooses to analyze it, he does not have to know by what means that result was achieved-but it is my job to know."
"Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind, and a step that travels unlimited roads."
"Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy."
"Self-esteem is reliance on one's power to think... The man of authentic self-confidence is the man who relies on the judgment of his own mind."
"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."