"

The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.

"

When you are asked to love everybody indiscriminately, that is to love people without any standard, to love them regardless of whether they have any v...more

"

Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your m...more

"

I consider marriage a very important institution, but it is important when and if two people have found the person with whom they wish to spend the re...more

"

A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.

"

Integrity is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your consciousness, just as honesty is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake ...more

"

Happiness is not to be achieved at the command of emotional whims. Happiness is not the satisfaction of whatever irrational wishes you might blindly a...more

"

To think is an act of choice. The key to what you so recklessly call ‘human nature,’ the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact tha...more

"

Man’s life, as required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless brute, of a looting thug or a mooching mystic, but the life of a thinking being—n...more

"

Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by...more

"

Thinking is man’s only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which al...more

"

The anti-mind is the anti-life.

"

A being of volitional consciousness has no automatic course of behavior. He needs a code of values to guide his actions. ‘Value’ is that which one act...more

"

A rational process is a moral process. You may make an error at any step of it, with nothing to protect you but your own severity, or you may try to c...more

"

A process of reason is a process of constant choice in answer to the question: True or False? - Right or Wrong?