Love Expands

The man of authentic self-confidence is the man who relies on the judgment of his own mind. Such a man is not malleable; he may be mistaken, he may be fooled in a given instance, but he is inflexible in regard to the absolutism of reality, i.e., in seeking and demanding truth.

You must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the secondary consequences.

In order to be in control of your life, you have to have a purpose-a productive purpose.

Serenity comes from the ability to say Yes to existence. Courage comes from the ability to say No to the wrong choices made by others.

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 moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values.

No man can use his brain to think for another.

My views on charity are very simple. I do not consider it a major virtue and, above all, I do not consider it a moral duty. There is nothing wrong in helping other people, if and when they are worthy of the help and you can afford to help them. I regard charity as a marginal issue. What I am fighting is the idea that charity is a moral duty and a primary virtue.

If it were true that men could achieve their good by means of turning some men into sacrificial animals, and … if I were asked to serve the interests of society apart from, above and against my own I would refuse… I would fight in the full confidence of the justice of my battle and of a living being’s right to exist.

The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word ‘selfishness’ is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual ‘package-deal,’ which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind.

Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live.

The moral justification of capitalism does not lie in the altruist claim that it represents the best way to achieve ‘the common good.’ It is true that capitalism does — if that catch-phrase has any meaning — but this is merely a secondary consequence. The moral justification for capitalism lies in the fact that it is the only system consonant with man’s rational nature, that it protects man’s survival qua man, and that its ruling principle is: justice

The secret dread of modern intellectuals, liberals and conservatives alike, the unadmitted terror at the root of their anxiety, which all of their current irrationalities are intended to stave off and to disguise, is the unstated knowledge that Soviet Russia [was] the full, actual, literal, consistent embodiment of the morality of altruism, that Stalin did not corrupt a noble ideal, that this is the only way altruism has to be or can ever be practiced.