Reason can be fought with reason. How are you going to fight the unreasonable? The trouble with you, my dear, and with most people, is that you don't have sufficient respect for the senseless. The senseless is the major factor in our lives. You have no chance if it is your enemy.

Is it advisable to spread out all the conveniences of culture before people to whom a few steps up a stair to a library is a sufficient deterrent from reading?

No man can use his brain to think for another.

There's so much nonsense about human inconstancy and the transience of all emotions. I've always thought that a feeling which changes never existed in the first place.

Your soul has a single basic function-the act of valuing.

I want to sleep with you. Now, tonight, and at any time you may care to call me. I want your naked body, your skin. your mouth, your hands...--I want you like an animal...or a whore.

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.

Don't worry. They're all against me. But I have one advantage: they don't know what they want. I do.

The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind.

Whether it's a symphony or a coal mine, all work is an act of creating and comes from the same source: from an inviolate capacity to see through one's own eyes-which means: the capacity to perform a rational identification- which means: the capacity to see, to connect and to make what had not been seen, connected and made before.

I am an intransigent atheist, though not a militant one. This means that I am not fighting against religion -- I am fighting for reason.

Remember that rights are moral principles which define and protect a man's freedom of action, but impose no obligations on other men.

Do not make the mistake of the ignorant who think that an individualist is a man who says: I'll do as I please at everybody else's expense. An individualist is a man who recognizes the inalienable individual rights of man--his own and those of others.

The political function of 'the right of free speech' is to protect dissenters and unpopular minorities from forcible suppression -- not to guarantee them the support, advantages, and rewards of a popularity they have not gained.

While, politically, a mixed economy preserves the semblance of an organized society with a semblance of law and order, economically it is the equivalent of the chaos that had ruled China for centuries: a chaos of robber gangs looting-and draining-the productive elements of the country.

Roark smiled, Gail, if this boat were sinking, I'd give my life to save you. Not because it's any kind of duty. Only because I like you, for reasons and standards of my own. I could die for you. But I couldn't and wouldn't live for you.

Science was born as a result and consequence of philosophy; it cannot survive without a philosophical base. If philosophy perishes, science will be next to go.

Self-esteem is reliance on one's power to think. It cannot be replaced by one's power to deceive. The self-confidence of a scientist and the self-confidence of a con man are not interchangeable states, and do not come from the same psychological universe. The success of a man who deals with reality augments his self-confidence. The success of a con man augments his panic.

The social system based on and consonant with the altruist morality-with the code of self-sacrifice- is socialism, in all or any of its variants: fascism, Nazism, communism. All of them treat man as a sacrificial animal to be immolated for the benefit of the group, the tribe, the society, the state.

Capitalism and altruism are incompatible; they are philosophical opposites; they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society.