But there are people who'll try to hurt you through the good they see in you--knowing that it's the good, needing it and punishing you for it. Don't let it break you when you discover that.

Ah, there's nothing like tea in the afternoon. When the British Empire collapses, historians will find that it had made but two invaluable contributions to civilization - this tea ritual and the detective novel.

In order to be in control of your life, you have to have a purpose-a productive purpose.

Every form has its own meaning. Every man creates his meaning and form and goal. Why is it so important - what others have done? Why does it become sacred by the mere fact of not being your own? Why is anyone and everyone right - so long as it's not yourself? Why does the number of those others take the place of truth? Why is truth made a mere matter of arithmetic - and only of addition at that? Why is everything twisted out of all sense to fit everything else? There must be some reason. I don't know. I've never known it. I'd like to understand.

As a cultural-intellectual power and a moral ideal, collectivism died in World War II. If we are still rolling in its direction, it is only by the inertia of a void and the momentum of disintegration. A social movement that began with the ponderous, brain-cracking, dialectical constructs of Hegel and Marx, and ends up with a horde of morally unwashed children stamping their foot and shrieking: "I want it now is through."

Fight for the value of your person. Fight for the virtue of your pride. Fight for the essence of that which is man: for his sovereign rational mind. Fight with the radiant certainty and the absolute rectitude of knowing that yours is the Morality of Life and that yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth

Every honest man lives for himself. Every man worth calling a man lives for himself. The one who doesn't - doesn't live at all.