People said it because other people said it. They did not know why it was being said and heard everywhere. they did not give or ask for reasons.

I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed.

To achieve, you need thought

She had learned, in the slums of her childhood, that honest people were never touchy about the matter of being trusted.

It's not that I don't suffer, it's that I know the unimportance of suffering. I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one's soul and as a permanent scar across one's view of existence.

America's abundance was created not by public sacrifices to the common good, but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America's industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages, and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance- and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way.