Never ask people. Not about your work. Don't you know what you want? How can you stand it, not to know?

Look around you and look at history. You will see the achievements of man’s mind. You will see man’s unlimited potentiality for greatness, and the faculty that makes it possible. You will see that man is not a helpless monster by nature, but he becomes one when he discards that faculty: his mind. And if you ask me, what is greatness? I will answer, it is the capacity to live by the three fundamental values of John Galt: reason, purpose, self-esteem.

Money is the barometer of a society's virtue.

A culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiate d masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.

No man may initiate the use of physical force against others. No man-or group or society or government-has the right to assume the role of a criminal and initiate the use of physical compulsion against any man. Men have the right to use physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. The ethical principle involved is simple and clear-cut: it is the difference between murder and self-defense.

Ideas are the greatest and most crucially practical power on earth.

You'd let the whole world perish rather than soil that immaculate self of yours with a single spot of which you'd have to be ashamed.