If a man speculates on what 'society' should do for the poor, he accepts thereby the collectivist premise that men's lives belong to society and that he, as a member of society, has the right to dispose of them...that psychological confession reveals the enormity of the extent to which altruism erodes men's capacity to grasp the concept of rights or the value of an individual life.

That an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error.

Guilt is altruism's stock in trade, and the inducing of guilt is its only means of self-perpetuati on.

Of all the statist violations of individual rights in a mixed economy, the military draft is the worst. It is an abrogation of rights. It negates man’s fundamental right-the right to life-and establishes the fundamental principle of statism: that a man’s life belongs to the state, and the state may claim it by compelling him to sacrifice it in battle. Once that principle is accepted, the rest is only a matter of time.

The men who are not interested in philosophy need it most urgently: they are most helplessly in its power. The men who are not interested in philosophy absorb its principles from the cultural atmosphere around them-from schools, colleges, books, magazines, newspapers, movies, television, etc. Who sets the tone of a culture? A small handful of men: the philosophers. Others follow their lead, either by conviction or by default.

He had a big head and a face so ugly it became almost fascinating.

You know what you are actually in love with? Integrity. The impossible. The clean, consistent, reasonable, self-faithful, the all-of-one-style, like a work of art.