Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
Creation comes before distribution—or there will be nothing to distribute. The need of the creator comes before the need of any possible beneficiary.
Don’t set out to raze all shrines—you’ll frighten men. Enshrine mediocrity—and the shrines are razed.
I am an American by choice and conviction. I was born in Europe, but I came to America because this was the country based on my moral premises and the only country where one could be fully free to write.
I despise the public. That’s my only vindication.
I mean that groups of men are vacuums. Great big empty nothings. They say we can’t visualize a total nothing. Hell, sit at any committee meeting.
If one doesn’t respect oneself one can have neither love nor respect for others.
It’s easier to donate a few thousands to charity and think oneself noble than to base self-respect on personal standards of personal achievement.
My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.
Reason can be fought with reason. How are you going to fight the unreasonable?
There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought. An agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise or an average drawn upon many individual thoughts.
Those who speak of love most promiscuously are the ones who’ve never felt it. They make some sort of feeble stew out of sympathy, compassion, contempt and general indifference, and they call it love.
[Man] can survive in only one of two ways--by the independent work of his own mind or as a parasite fed by the minds of others. The creator originates. The parasite borrows.