“Philosophers will always have logical reasons for avoiding the good—and those reasons will always hang on their lust for material goods. A man who has little thinks little of sharing it; but the man who has much will clutch it with his dying fingers.”

“A man who for an entire week does nothing but hit himself over the head has little reason to be proud.”

“It is a Reasonable presumption that a man who sleeps upon his rights has not got much right.”

“Those who have much are often greedy; those who have little often share.”

“A good big man will always beat a small little punk.”

“He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion.”

“Objectivism's philosophy of man begins with the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness: man is the one animal who has to choose to be conscious, to use his mind. Man is a rational animal, and reason is his only guide to knowledge, reason being that faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by man's senses.”

“People have wondered where the seat of original sin is; I think it 's in the stomach. A man eats too much and neglects exercise, and the Devil has him all his own way, and the little imps, with their long black fingers, play on his nerves like a piano. Never overwork either body or mind, boys. All the work that a man can do that can be rested by one night's sleep is good for him, but fatigue that goes into the next day is always bad.”

“Happy is the man, I thought, who, before dying, has the good fortune to sail the Aegean sea.”

“He who has lived as a true philosopher has reason to be of good cheer when he is about to die, and that after death he may hope to receive the greatest good in the other world.”