The art of writing is the art of doing what you think you're doing. This is not as simple as it sounds. It implies a very difficult undertaking: the necessity to think. And it implies the requirement to think out three separate, very hard problems: What is it you want to say? How are you going to say it? Have you really said it?

The conservatives want to rule man's consciousness; the liberals, his body.

Let us destroy, but don't let us pretend that we are commiting an act of virtue.

Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer - and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.

Political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries.

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.

Any refusal to recognize reality, for any reason whatever, has disastrous consequences. There are no evil thoughts except one: the refusal to think. Don't ignore your own desires.... Don't sacrifice them. Examine their cause. There is a limit to how much you should have to bear.