It meant nothing to him any longer, only a faint tinge of sadness--and somewhere within him, a drop of pain moving briefly and vanishing, like a raindrop on the glass of a window, its course in the shape of a question mark.

My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.

If men want to oppose war, it is statism that they must oppose. So long as they hold the tribal notion that the individual is sacrificial fodder for the collective, that some men have the right to rule others by force, and that some (any) alleged “good” can justify it-there can be no peace within a nation and no peace among nations.

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.

This god, this one word: I.

I worship individuals for their highest possibilities as individuals and I loathe humanity for its failure to live up to these possibilities.

The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap.