I have an admiration, even though I'm not likely to do that sort of thing myself, for [Ayn] Roark's behavior when he decided that his design was not being followed - which was a gross violation, by the way, of private property rights, because the building was his.

I've developed my anarchism, my critique of Marxism, which has been the most advanced bourgeois ideology I know of, into a community of ideas and ultimately a common sense of responsibilities and commitments.

I regard individuality as the most precious trait we have, because without it there is no creativity, there is no consciousness, there is no rationality. There is nothing that could make me speak more strongly to this point.

Whether they [left in America are] anarcho-communists, anarcho-syndicalists, or libertarians who believe in free enterprise, I regard theirs as the real legacy of the left, and I feel much closer, ideologically, to such individuals than I do to the totalitarian liberals and Marxist-Leninists of today.

If we recognise that every ecosystem can also be viewed as a food web, we can think of it as a circular, interlacing nexus of plant animal relationships (rather than a stratified pyramid with man at the apex)… Each species, be it a form of bacteria or deer, is knitted together in a network of interdependence, however indirect the links may be.

I'm talking of the idea, basically very widespread in America, that the less government the better, which is obviously being used to the advantage of the big corporations, but none-the-less has very radical implications. The idea of a people that exercises a great deal of federalist or confederalist control, the ideal of a grass-roots type of democracy, the idea of the freedom of the individual which is not to get lost in the mazes of anarcho-egotism à la Stirner, or for that matter right-wing libertarianism.

What higher property do you have than your own person? I totally agree, by the way, with John Locke's idea that one's body is literally the most precious property that exists. I would say that conscription is the most heinous violation of property that one can imagine.