What is my life, if I am but to bow, to agree, and to obey?

What kind of 'changing world', Alvah? Changing to what? From what? Who's doing the changing?

The integrated sum of a man's basic values is his sense of life.

Redeem your mind from the hockshops of authority.

Thinking is something one doesn't borrow or pawn.

Man's mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not." stated by John Galt

Have you always liked being Howard Roark?" Roark smiled. The smile was amused, astonished, involuntarily contemptuous.

It's not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

It wasn't a matter of conscious choice, necessarily, just a matter of gravitational pull, the way integration always worked, a one-way street. The minority assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around. Only white culture could be neutral and objective. Only white culture could be nonracial, willing to adopt the occasional exotic into its ranks.

The road we have taken to this point has not been easy. But then again the road to change never is.

It was as if, because of the very strangeness of my heritage and the worlds I straddled, I was from everywhere and nowhere at once, a combination of ill-fitting parts, like a platypus or some imaginary beast, confined to a fragile habitat, unsure of where I belonged. And I sensed, without fully understanding why or how, that unless I could stitch my life together and situate myself along some firm axis, I might end up in some basic way living my life alone.

Mr. Shepherd, ye cannot stop a bad thought from coming into your head. But ye need not pull up a chair and bide it sit down. - Mrs. Brown