I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life's a bitch. You've got to go out and kick ass.

However many holy words you read, However many you speak, What good will they do you If you do not act on upon them?

We acquire a particular quality by acting in a particular way.

The thought of only being a creature of the present and the past was troubling. I longed for a future, too, with hope in it. The desire to be free, awakened my determination to act, to think, and to speak.

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take for better, for worse, as his portion; that, though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

Don’t be ‘a writer’. Be writing.

There is a force that somehow pushes us to choose the more difficult path whereby we can transcend the mire and muck into which we are so often born. Despite all that resists the process, we do become better human beings.

You can’t change how people treat you or what they say about you. All you can do is change how you react to it.

We are free up to the point of choice, then the choice controls the chooser.

It is your decisions, and not your conditions, that determine your destiny.

He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation.

We don’t choose to be role models; we are chosen. Our only choice is whether to be a good role model or a bad one.

The secret of success is learning how to use pain and pleasure instead of having pain and pleasure use you. If you do that, you're in control of your life. If you don't, life controls you.

Fundamentally, there are only to ways of coordinating the economic activities of millions. One is central direction involving the use of coercion — the technique of the army and the modern totalitarian state. The other is voluntary cooperation — the technique of the marketplace.

But we cannot simply sit and stare at our wounds forever.

I hope you live a life you're proud of. If you find that you are not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.

Pain is certain, suffering is optional.

The average person puts only 25% of his energy and ability into his work. The world takes off its hat to those who put in more than 50% of their capacity, and stands on its head for those few and far between souls who devote 100%.

One's philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes.

When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - When you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, butt in favors - When you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you - When you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - You may know that your society is doomed.

The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink.

I learned that the only way you are going to get anywhere in life is to work hard at it. Whether you're a musician, a writer, an athlete or a businessman, there is no getting around it. If you do, you'll win—if you don't, you won't.

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed.