You don't know how hard I've tried to be left standing all by myself.

It is easier to donate a few thousand to charity and think oneself noble than to base self-respect on personal standards of personal achievement.

Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life. Redeem your mind from the hockshops of authority. Accept the fact that you are not omniscient, but playing a zombie will not give you omniscience-that your mind is fallible, but becoming mindless will not make you infallible-that an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error.

When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit.

Thanksgiving is a typically American holiday. In spite of its religious form (giving thanks to God for a good harvest), its essential, secular meaning is a celebration of successful production. It is a producers’ holiday. The lavish meal is a symbol of the fact that abundant consumption is the result and reward of production. Abundance is (or was and ought to be) America’s pride-just as it is the pride of American parents that their children need never know starvation.

For they have nothing to fight me with, save the brute force of their numbers. I have my mind.

An emotion as much tells you nothing about reality, beyond the fact that something makes you feel something.