Quote collection
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"It does not matter that only a few in each generation will grasp and achieve the full reality of man's proper stature-and the rest will betray it. It is those few that move the world and give life its meaning-and it is those few that I have always sought to address. The rest are no concern of mine; it is not me or "The Fountainhead" that they will betray: it is their own souls."
"Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values."
"I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction."
"Through all the centuries of the worship of the mindless, whatever stagnation humanity chose to endure, whatever brutality to practice-it was only by the grace of the men who perceived that wheat must have water in order to grow, that stones laid in a curve will form an arch, that two and two make four, that love is not served by torture and life is not fed by destruction-only by the grace of those men did the rest of them learn to experience moments when they caught the spark of being human."
"Thanksgiving is a typically American holiday...The lavish meal is a symbol of the fact that abundant consumption is the result and reward of production."
"A BUSINESSMAN cannot force you to buy his product; if he makes a mistake, He suffers the consequences; if he fails, he takes the loss. A bureaucrat, forces you to obey his decisions, whether you agree with him or not... If he makes a mistake, you suffer the consequences; If he fails, He passes the loss on to you, in the form of heavier taxes."
"The source of the government's authority is “the consent of the governed.” This means that the government is not the ruler, but the servant or agent of the citizens; it means that the government as such has no rights except the rights delegated to it by the citizens for a specific purpose."
"One must differentiate between one's thoughts and one's emotions with full clarity and precision...No discussion, cooperation, agreement, or understanding is possible among men who substitute emotion for proof."
"In order to live, man must act; in order to act, he must make choices; in order to make choices, he must define a code of values; in order to define a code of values, he must know what he is and where he is – i.e. he must know his own nature (including his means of knowledge) and the nature of the universe in which he acts – i.e. he needs metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, which means: philosophy. He cannot escape from this need; his only alternative is whether the philosophy guiding him is to be chosen by his mind or by chance."
"Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong."
"America's founding Ideal was the principle of individual rights. Nothing more - and nothing less."
"Laissez-faire capitalism is the only social system based on the recognition of individual rights and, therefore, the only system that bans force from social relationships."
"I got the idea [for Anthem's theme] in my school days, in Soviet Russia, when I heard all the vicious attacks on individualism, and asked myself what the world would be like if men lost the word 'I.'"
"There are two principles on which all men of intellectual integrity and good will can agree, as a 'basic minimum,' as a precondition of any discussion, co-operation or movement toward an intellectual Renaissance. . . . They are not axioms, but until a man has proved them to himself and has accepted them, he is not fit for an intellectual discussion. These two principles are: a. that emotions are not tools of cognition; b. that no man has the right to initiate the use of physical force against others."
"The secret dread of modern intellectuals, liberals and conservatives alike, the unadmitted terror at the root of their anxiety, which all of their current irrationalities are intended to stave off and to disguise, is the unstated knowledge that Soviet Russia [was] the full, actual, literal, consistent embodiment of the morality of altruism, that Stalin did not corrupt a noble ideal, that this is the only way altruism has to be or can ever be practiced."
"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."
"My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose."
"As long as men are free to speak, a small, rational minority will always prevail over an irrational majority."
"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, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on…There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all."
"The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow."