What objectivity and the study of philosophy requires is not an 'open mind,' but an active mind - a mind able and eagerly willing to examine ideas, but to examine them criticially.

I am speaking to those among you who have retained some sovereign shred of their soul, unsold and unstamped: '- to the order of others'. If, in the chaos of the motives that have made you listen to the radio tonight, there was an honest, rational desire to learn what is wrong with the world, you are the man whom I wished to address. By the rules and terms of my code, one owes a rational statement to those whom it does concern and who are making an effort to know. Those who are making an effort to fail to understand me, are not a concern of mine.

If you surrender everything to the government and give it total power to plan the whole economy, this will not guarantee your economic security, but it will guarantee the descent of the entire nation to a level of miserable poverty--as the practical results of every totalitarian economy, communist or fascist, have demonstrated.

I saw that evil was impotent—that evil was the irrational, the blind, the anti-real—and that the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it.

Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others.

The action required to sustain human life is primarily intellectual; everything man needs has to be discovered by his mind and produced by his effort.

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