The man of authentic self-confidence is the man who relies on the judgment of his own mind. Such a man is not malleable; he may be mistaken, he may be fooled in a given instance, but he is inflexible in regard to the absolutism of reality, i.e., in seeking and demanding truth.

She looked at the crowd and she felt simultaneously astonishment that they should stare at her when this event was so personally her own that no communication about it was possible and a sense of fitness that they should be here that they should want to see it. Because the sight of an achievement was the greatest gift a human being could offer to others.

The government's only proper job is to protect individual rights against violence by force or fraud ... to protect men from foreign invaders ... to settle disputes among men according to objective laws ... The greatness of the Founding Fathers was how well they understood this issue and how close some of them came to understanding it perfectly.

All public projects are mausoleums, not always in shapes, but always in cost.

Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting for us in our graves - or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.

Men have died in torture chambers, on the stake, in concentration camps, in front of firing squads, rather than renounce their convictions. The appeaser renounces his under the pressure of a frown on a vacant face.

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.