A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort ... is not strictly speaking a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang violence.

Unjust laws have to be fought ideologically; they cannot be fought or corrected by means of mere disobedience and futile martyrdom.

The man without a purpose is a man who drifts at the mercy of random feelings or unidentified urges and is capable of any evil, because he is totally out of control of his own life. In order to be in control of your life, you have to have a purpose-a productive purpose.

All work is an act of philosophy.

When one acts on pity against justice, it is the good whom one punishes for the sake of the evil; when one saves the guilty from suffering, it is the innocent whom one forces to suffer. There is no escape from justice, nothing can be unearned and unpaid for in the universe, neither in matter nor in spirit—and if the guilty do not pay, then the innocent have to pay it.

To know one's own desires, their meaning and their costs requires the highest human virtue: rationality.

Style is not an end in itself, it is only a means to an end - the means of telling a story.