Rationalization is a process of not perceiving reality, but of attempting to make reality fit one’s emotions.

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

He walked, groping for a sentence that hung in his mind as an empty shape. He could neither fill it or dismiss it.

"You were not born to be a second-hander." Howard Roark to Gail Wynand in "The Fountainhead"

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.

I want to be prepared to claim the greatest virtue of all - that I was a man who made money

She knew that she could not have reached this white serenity except as the sum of all the colors, of all the violence she had known.