John Galt Quotes

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

— John Galt

The self you have betrayed is your mind; self-esteem is reliance on one's power to think. The ego you seek, that essential "you" which you cannot express or define, is not your emotions or inarticulate dreams, but your intellect, that judge of your supreme tribunal whom you've impeached in order to drift at the mercy of any stray shyster you describe as your "feeling."

— John Galt

“There can be no causeless love or any sort of causeless emotion. An emotion is a response to a fact of reality, an estimate dictated by your standards.”

— John Galt

“Your mind is your only judge of truth-and if others dissent from your verdict, reality is the court of final appeal.”

— John Galt

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

— John Galt

“All property and all forms of wealth are produced by man's mind and labor.”

— John Galt

“I seek no values by means of evil, nor do I surrender my values to evil.”

— John Galt

“Justice is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature, that you must judge all men as conscientiously as you judge inanimate objects, with the same respect for truth, with the same incorruptible vision, by as pure and as rational a process of identification-that every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly ...”

— John Galt

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

— John Galt

“If enjoyment is a value, why is it moral when experienced by others, but immoral when experienced by you? ... Why is it immoral for your to desire, but moral for others to do so? Why is it immoral to produce a value and keep it, but moral to give it away?”

— John Galt

“An attempt to gain a value by deceiving the mind of others is an act of raising your victims to a position higher than reality.”

— John Galt

A trader does not squander his body as fodder or his soul as alms.

— John Galt

“The cloven-foot of self-interest was now and then to be seen aneath the robe of public principle.”

— John Galt

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

— John Galt

“I will stop the motor of the world.”

— John Galt

“If there are degrees of evil, it is hard to say who is more contemptible: the brute who assumes the right to force the mind of others or the moral degenerate who grants to others the right to force his mind.”

— John Galt

“To rule without being felt ... is the great mystery of policy.”

— 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.”

— John Galt

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

— John Galt

“From the time of the North Briton of the unprincipled Wilkes , a notion has been entertained that the moral spine in Scotland is more flexible than in England. The truth however is, that an elementary difference exists in the public feelings of the two nations quite as great as in the idioms of their respective dialects. The English are a justice-loving people, according to charter and statute; the Scotch are a wrong-resenting race, according to right and feeling: and the character of liberty among them takes its aspect from that peculiarity.”

— John Galt

“The choice
the dedication to one's highest potential
is made by accepting the fact that the noblest act you have ever performed is the act of your mind in the process of grasping that two and two make four.”

— John Galt