A spirit, too, needs fuel. It can run dry.

Errors of knowledge are not breaches of morality; no proper moral code can demand infallibility or omniscience.

We are now moving towards complete collectivism or socialism, a system under which everybody is enslaved to everybody.

When intellectual leaders fail to foster the best in the mixed, unformed, vacillating character of people at large, the thugs are sure to bring out the worst. When the ablest men turn into cowards, the average men turn into brutes.

Because, you see, God - whatever anyone chooses to call God - is one's highest conception of the highest possible. And whoever places his highest conception above his own possibility thinks very little of himself and his life. It's a rare gift, you know, to feel reverence for your own life and to want the best, the greatest, the highest possible, here, now, for your very own. To imagine a heaven and then not to dream of it, but to demand it.

I am an intransigent atheist, though not a militant one. This means that I am not fighting against religion - I am fighting for reason.

The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, and to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law.