The Middle Ages were an era of mysticism, ruled by blind faith and blind obedience to the dogma that faith is superior to reason. The Renaissance was specifically the rebirth of reason, the liberation of man's mind, the triumph of rationality over mysticism - a faltering, incomplete, but impassioned triumph that led to the birth of science, of individualism, of freedom.

If you tell an ugly woman that she is beautiful, you offer her the great homage of corrupting the concept of beauty.

Statism needs war; a free country does not. Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by producing.

Do it first and feel about it afterwards.' - Dagny Taggart

To be the kind of writer you want to be, you must first be the kind of thinker you want to be.

Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgement and nothing can help you escape it - that no substitute can do your thinking, as no pinch-hitter can live your life.

The concept of individual rights is so prodigious a feat of political thinking that few men grasp it fully - and two hundred years have not been enough for other countries to understand it. But this is the concept to which we owe our lives - the concept which made it possible for us to bring into reality everything of value that any of us did or will achieve or experience.