When one acts on pity against justice, it is the good whom one punishes for the sake of the evil; when one saves the guilty from suffering, it is the innocent whom one forces to suffer. There is no escape from justice, nothing can be unearned and unpaid for in the universe, neither in matter nor in spirit—and if the guilty do not pay, then the innocent have to pay it.

Identify the dominant philosophy of a society and you can predict its future.

The purpose of the law is not to prevent a future offense, but to punish the one actually committed.

A government is the most dangerous threat to man

It's the hardest thing in the world - to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kinds of courage.

It does not matter that only a few in each generation will grasp and achieve the full reality of man's proper stature-and the rest will betray it. It is those few that move the world and give life its meaning-and it is those few that I have always sought to address. The rest are no concern of mine; it is not me or "The Fountainhead" that they will betray: it is their own souls.

No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the sum of his knowledge.