When personal judgment is inoperative (or forbidden), men's first concern is not how to choose, but how to justify their choice

Man's mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action. He cannot obtain his food without a knowledge of food and of the way to obtain it. He cannot dig a ditch-or build a cyclotron-without a knowledge of his aim and of the means to achieve it. To remain alive, he must think

To be the kind of writer you want to be, you must first be the kind of thinker you want to be.

Only the man who extols the purity of love devoid of desire, is capable of the depravity of a desire devoid of love.

Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality. But existence exists; reality is not to be wiped out, it will merely wipe out the wiper

I cannot stand Tolstoy, and reading him was the most boring literary duty I ever had to perform, his philosophy and his sense of life are not merely mistaken, but evil, and yet, from a purely literary viewpoint, on his own terms, I have to evaluate him as a good writer.

Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.