“This story is the ultimate example of Americans biggest political problem. We no longer have the attention span to deal with any twenty-first century crisis. We live in an economy that is immensely...”

“Washington politicians basically view the People as a capricious and dangerous enemy, a dumb mob whose only interesting quality happens to be their power to take away politicians' jobs... When the ...”

“America is no longer a country that cares about experts. In fact, it hates experts. If you can't fit a story into the culture-war storyline in ten seconds or less, it dies.”

“After eighteen long months covering this dreary business, the whole campaign appears in my minds eye as one long, protracted scratch-fight over Internet-fueled nonsense.”

“In a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.”

“The new America, instead, is fast becoming a vast ghetto in which all of us, conservatives and progressives, are being bled dry by a relatively tiny oligarchy of extremely clever financial criminal...”

“Why have you been staring at me ever since we met? Because Im not the Gail Wynand youd heard about. You see, I love you. And love is exception-making. If you were in love youd want to be broken, tr...”

“What separates Rand from Marx is that the latter saw the true flourishing of individual creativity as best accomplished through collaboration and association with others in a collective drive to ab...”

“If everybody spent enough time worrying about their own goddamn selves, no one would have to worry about anyone else.”

“I do not snivel that snivel the world over,That months are vacuums and the ground but wallow and filth,That life is a suck and a sell, and nothing remains at the end but threadbare crape and tears.”

“I spit on your happiness! I spit on your idea of life--that life that must go on, come what may. You are all like dogs that lick everything they smell. You with your promise of a humdrum happiness-...”

“Life is such unutterable hell, solely because it is sometimes beautiful. If we could only be miserable all the time, if there could be no such things as love or beauty or faith or hope, if I could ...”

“We are born into this world unarmed - our mind is our only weapon.”

“Your moral code begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practiceIt demands that he starts, not with a standard of value, but wi...”

“Men who reject the responsibility of thought and reason can only exist as parasites on the thinking of others.”