A 'coercive monopoly' is a business concern that can set its prices and production policies independent of the market, with immunity from competition, from the law of supply and demand.

"The secret of life.

"This may sound naïve. But—is our life ever to have any reality? Are we ever going to live on the level?

"The art of any given period or culture is a faithful reflection of that culture's philosophy. If you see obscene, dismembered monstrosities leering at you from today's esthetic mirrors—the aborted creations of mediocrity, irrationality and panic—you are seeing the embodied, concretized reality of the philosophical premises that dominate today's culture.

"If he finds himself fearing, evading and negating the highest experience possible to man, a state of unclouded exaltation, he can know that he is profound trouble and that his only alternatives are:

"What we need are real intellectuals, that is, thinkers. But we cannot 'convert' thinkers or 'regain their devotion.' We need them to convert us—that is, to teach businessmen and conservatives the proper kind of philosophy.

"When I am questioned about myself, I am tempted to say, paraphrasing Roark: 'Don't ask me about my family, my childhood, my friends or my feelings. Ask me about the things I think.'

" ... 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.

"Can this country achieve a peaceful rebirth in the foreseeable future?

"On the basis of a knowable universe and of a rational faculty's competence to grasp it, you can define man's proper ethics, politics and esthetics.

"No problem will be solved by means of a mixed economy, with some controls and some freedom.

"I do not approve of any government controls over consumption, so all restrictions on drugs should be removed (except, of course, on the sale to minors).

"Buy yourself some classical records. I cannot listen to modern music. I cannot hear it. It's anything but music."

Ayn Rand

"Our present state of cultural disintegration is not maintained and prolonged by intellectuals as such, but by the fact that we haven't any.

"The great treason of the philosophers was that they, the thinkers, defaulted on the responsibility of providing a rational society with a code of rational morality.

What are the nature and the causes of modern tribalism? Philosophically, tribalism is the product of irrationalism and collectivism. It is a logical consequence of modern philosophy. If men accept the notion that reason is not valid, what is to guide them and how are they to live?

Morality is the province of philosophical judgment, not of psychological diagnosis.

The precept: "Judge not, that ye be not judged" … is an abdication of moral responsibility: it is a moral blank check one gives to others in exchange for a moral blank check one expects for oneself.

"There is a fundamental conviction which some people never acquire, some hold only in their youth, and a few hold to the end of their days—the conviction that ideas matter.

"Freedom of speech means freedom from interference, suppression or punitive action by the government—and nothing else.

"The political philosophy of America's Founding Fathers is so thoroughly buried under decades of statist misrepresentations on one side and empty lip-service on the other, that it has to be rediscovered, not ritualistically repeated.

"Since all art is communication, there can be nothing more viciously contradictory than the idea of nonobjective art.