Potentially, a government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights; it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims. When unlimited and unrestricted by individual rights, a government is man's deadliest enemy. It is not as protection against private actions, but against governmental actions that the Bill of Rights was written.

Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman's tool is values; the bureaucrat's tool is fear.

My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists - and in a single choice: to live.

The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence.

Andrei, did you like the opera?" "Not particularly." "Andrei, do you see what you're missing?" "I don't think I do, Kira. It's all rather silly. And useless." "Can't you enjoy things that are useless, merely because they are beautiful?" "No. But I enjoyed it." "The music?" "No. The way you listened to it.

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.

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