My greatest personal mistake is ever to allow a word or moment that “doesn’t count,” i.e., that I do not refer to my own basic principles. Every word, every action, every moment counts. (This is the pattern on which everybody makes mistakes [or] becomes irrational — not relating their one action or one conviction to another.

I am a man who does not exist for others.

You will follow me, if we are what we are, you and I, if we live, if the world exists, if you know the meaning of this moment and can't let it slip by, as others let it slip, into the senselessness of the unwilled and unreached.

America’s founding ideal was the principle of individual rights. Nothing more-and nothing less. The rest-everything that America achieved, everything she became, everything 'noble and just,' and heroic, and great, and unprecedented in human history-was the logical consequence of fidelity to that one principle.

Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration.

But neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as man is free to attempt to survive in any random manner, but will perish unless he lives as his nature requires, so he is free to seek his happiness in any mindless fraud, but the torture of frustration is all he will find, unless he seeks the happiness proper to man. The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.

It's not that I don't suffer, it's that I know the unimportance of suffering. I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one's soul and as a permanent scar across one's view of existence.