Quotes from John Galt

Every form of causeless self-doubt, every feeling of inferiority and secret unworthiness is, in fact, man's hidden dread of his inability to deal with existence.

In a word, man in London is not quite so good a creature as he is out of it.

Government power is always abused by seizing and perverting the law. And with few exceptions, government always determines what is law.

Evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from us.

No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind that has to acquire it.

I want every fan of Rand to hear [Polaha] say the classic Galt phrase: "I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

Man's mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not.

Ye dinna ken whar frae? - I'll tell you whar frae - frae hell; sic thoughts are the cormorants that sit on the apple trees in the devil's kail-yard, and the souls o the damned are the carcasses they mak their meat o.

I have never considered the exoteric doctrines of my associates very seriously... Some of the purest characters I have ever known are Roman catholics, and the most sordid, sectarians and presbyterians. Speculative opinions have less to do than is supposed with the conduct of men.

It is our duty to help ane anither in this howling wilderness.

In the meantime, his majesty, who has lived in dignified retirement since he came to the throne, has taken up his abode, with rural felicity, in a cottage in Windsor Forest; where he now, contemning all the pomp and follies of his youth, and this metropolis, passes his days amidst his cabbages, like Dioclesian, with innocence and tranquility, far from the intrigues of courtiers, and insensible to the murmering waves of the fluctuating populace...

Whatever he was-that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love-he was not man.

A trader is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved.

Man cannot survive except by gaining knowledge, and reason is his only means to gain it.