“I like cigarettes, Miss Taggart. I like to think of fire held in a man’s hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what great things have come from such hours. When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind-and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression.”

“I like cigarettes, Miss Taggart. I like to think of fire held in a man’s hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what great things have come from such hours. When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind-and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression.”

“To irrational principles, one cannot be loyal. Ideas that are not derived from reality cannot be consistently practiced in reality.--as quoted by Leonard Peikoff in "Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand”

“Charity must be voluntary.”

“Let us throw away our candles and our torches. Let us flood the cities with light. Let us bring a new light to men! -Equality 7-2521”

“It [ballet] projects a fragile kind of strength and a certain inflexible precision.”

“She [Ayn Rand] had to declare that....altruism was despicable, that only self-interest is good and noble. (About Ayn Rand)”

“I have yet to see a genius or a hero who, if stuck with a burning match, would feel less pain than his undistinguished average brother.”

“Only a man of integrity can possess the virtue of honesty, since only the faking of one’s consciousness can permit the faking of existence.”

“Politically, the goal of today’s dominant trendis statism. Philosophically, the goal is theobliteration of reason;psychologically, it is theerosion of ambition.”

“My greatest personal mistake is ever to allow a word or moment that “doesn’t count,” i.e., that I do not refer to my own basic principles. Every word, every action, every moment counts. (This is the pattern on which everybody makes mistakes [or] becomes irrational — not relating their one action or one conviction to another.”

“But I still wonder how it was possible, in those graceless years of transition, long ago, that men did not see whither they were going, and went on, in blindness and cowardice, to their fate. I wonder, for it is hard for me to conceive how men who knew the word "I," could give it up and not know what they lost. But such has been the story, for I have lived in the City of the damned, and I know what horror men permitted to be brought upon them.”