I want to create a better world while we still can. I want to start “a revolution in men’s minds while those minds are still open.” I want to live in and help create a world “as it might be and ought to be.”

I want Ayn Rand’s books to reach what she called “my kind of reader.” I want to introduce active, eager young minds to Ayn Rand’s books—I want more of the right minds to be aware that Ayn Rand’s ideas give “statement and voice to what the best of mankind has always believed.”

I want to “love the good for being the good.” In Ayn Rand’s words, “If you hold on to the vision of any value you love—your mind, your work, your wife or husband, or your child—and remember that that is what the enemy is after, your shudder of rebellion will give you the moral fire. The courage and the intransigence needed in this battle. What fuel can support one’s fire? Love for man at his highest potential.”

I want to recognize the glory of man. I want to value man as a heroic being in art, in literature, in reality, now—and build a future in which such a hero can thrive.

I want to be happy. “Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy—a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but of using your mind’s fullest power, not the joy of faking reality, but of achieving values that are real, not the joy of a drunkard, but of a producer.” In order to do this I have to be free. I want to support an organization that effectively and appropriately fights for my freedom.

I want to defend free markets and the moral virtue of making a profit. I want to liberate businessmen from the shackles of government regulation so that I can benefit from the innovation and prosperity of a free economy.

I want people to understand that freedom depends on reason and the ethics of rational self-interest. I want to do as much as I can to fight the people who want to rule my life, who try to destroy the human mind, to replace reason with faith or anything else—just so I will do what they tell me. I want to fight the people who brand me as evil for being selfish and demand that I feel guilty for refusing to accept unchosen obligations and “duties” to sacrifice myself to others. I want to fight the people who want to disarm me morally in order to get me to surrender my rights.

I want to affirm and defend my rights to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness. It is psychologically necessary to be consciously efficacious in reality—to feel that I am “captain of my fate and master of my soul,” rather than “lonely and afraid in a world I never made.”

I want to assert that it is a benevolent universe (i.e., “auspicious for life”) and act on that assumption. As expressed by Leonard Peikoff in his book, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand: “The outstanding classical exponent of this philosophy is Aristotle. I am thinking of the serenity of his ’Great-souled man’ and of Aristotle’s conviction that eudaimonia is the human entelechy. The natural and proper human end, to which all rational endeavors contribute, Aristotle holds, is a state of rich, ripe, fulfilling earthly happiness.”

I want to realize that recognizing man’s moral grandeur today is a powerful weapon in moving civilization toward the freedom in which greatness can prosper. I also want to realize in my own life that “what one does not seize from the moment, eternity will not give back.” That hope for the future must be its own reward today. Or as Ayn Rand put it, “anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today.”