The only proper, moral purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence - to protect his right to his own life, to his own liberty, to his own property and to the pursuit of his own happiness. Without property rights, no other rights are possible.

If some men are entitled by right to the products of the work of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labor.

You can ignore reality, but you can't ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.

Dagny, we can never lose the things we live for. We may have to change their form at times, if we've made an error, but the purpose remains the same and the forms are ours to make.

Place nothing above the verdict of your own mind.

Even in dialogue, your own style rules your selection. Do not give yourself a blank check of this kind: 'I'll merely reproduce what I think a character like so-and-so would say.' You have to reproduce it in the way your literary premises dictate.

I understood that centuries of chains and lashes will not kill the spirit of man nor the sense of truth within him.