No man can predict the time when others will choose to return to reason.

To say that that which was true in the 17th century cannot possibly be true today, because we travel in jet planes while they traveled in horse carts—is like saying that modern men do not need food, as men did in the past, because they are wearing trenchcoats and slacks, instead-of powdered wigs and hoop skirts.

She caught herself thinking: She's functioning well in an emergency, I'll be all right with her—and realized that she was thinking of herself.

There was no action she could take against the men of undefined thought, of unnamed motives, of unstated purposes, of unspecified morality. There was nothing she could say to them—nothing would be heard or answered. What were the weapons, she thought, in a realm where reason was not a weapon any longer?

Why, child, such things are to be decided only by you and my son.

Redeem your mind from the hockshops of authority.

Throughout his life, whenever he became convinced that a course of action was right, the desire to follow it had come automatically.

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

What is kinder—to believe the best of people and burden them with a nobility beyond their endurance—or to see them as they are, and accept it because it makes them comfortable?

At some fundamental level, religion does not allow for compromise. It insists on the impossible. If God has spoken, then followers are expected to live up to God's edicts, regardless of the consequences. To base one's life on such uncompromising commitments may be sublime; to base our policy making on such commitments would be a dangerous thing.

I'm an old-fashioned guy. I believe in the Enlightenment, and reason, and logic, and you know, facts.

Through them, I discovered a community of faith—that it was okay to doubt, to question, and still reach for something beyond the here and now.