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If you're naturally kind you attract a lot of people you don't like.

Anybody who is 25 or 30 years old has physical scars from all sorts of things, from tuberculosis to polio. It's the same with the mind.

Psychoanalysis is the mental illness it purports to cure.

Every once in a while someone without a single bad habit gets caught.

Evaluation and judgment are responses to what exists, sorting the things that pass before us into categories of good, bad, and indifferent. But a rational life, the life of a valuer, does not consist essentially in reaction. It consists in action. Man does not find his values, like the other animals; he creates them. The primary focus of a valuer is not to take the world as it comes and pass judgment. His primary focus is to identify what might and ought to exist, to uncover potentialities that he can exploit, to find ways of reshaping the world in the image of his values.

We shall assume that what each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but by pictures made by himself or given to him. If his atlas tells him the world is flat he will not sail near what he believes to be the edge of our planet for fear of falling off. If his maps include a fountain of eternal youth, a Ponce de Leon will go off in quest of it. If someone digs up yellow dirt that looks like gold, he will for a time act exactly as if he has found gold. The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do. It does not determine what they will achieve. It determines their effort, their feelings, their hopes, not their accomplishments and results.

Action based on reason, action therefore which is only to be understood by reason, knows only one end, the greatest pleasure of the acting individual.

Reason and action are congeneric and homogenous, two aspects of the same phenomenon.

...the evils of mankind are caused, not by the primary aggressiveness of individuals, but by their self-transcending identification with groups whose common denominator is low intelligence and high emotionality.

The continuous disasters of man's history are mainly due to his excessive capacity and urge to become identified with a tribe, nation, church or cause, and to espouse its credo uncritically and enthusiastically, even if its tenets are contrary to reason, devoid of self-interest and detrimental to the claims of self-preservation.We are thus driven to the unfashionable conclusion that the trouble with our species is not an excess of aggression, but an excess capacity for fanatical devotion.

Conscious and unconscious experiences do not belong to different compartments of the mind; they form a continuous scale of gradations, of degrees of awareness.

It is impossible to describe any human action if one does not refer to the meaning the actor sees in the stimulus as well as in the end his response is aiming at.

Benevolence is a commitment to achieving the values derivable from life with other people in society, by treating them as potential trading partners, recognizing their humanity, independence, and individuality, and the harmony between their interests and ours.

The rational individualist is not the enemy of benevolence or civility, but their truest exemplar.

The new frontiers to be conquered are mainly in the convolutions of the cortex.

Brain-washing starts in the cradle.

Science does not give us absolute and final certainty. It only gives us assurance within the limits of our mental abilities and the prevailing state of scientific thought.

From the psychological point of view, the self-asserting emotions, derived from emergency reactions, involve a narrowing of consciousness; the participatory emotions an expansion of consciousness by identificatory processes of various kinds.

...originality consists of the achievement of new combinations, and not of the creation of something out of nothing.

Society cannot contribute anything to the breeding and growing of ingenious men. A creative genius cannot be trained. There are no schools for creativeness. A genius is precisely a man who defies all schools and rules, who deviates from the traditional roads of routine and opens up new paths through land inaccessible before. A genius is always a teacher, never a pupil; he is always self-made.