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The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing. -- Ayn Rand
We have only two sources of information about the character of the people around us: we judge them by what they do and by what they say (particularly the first). -- Ayn Rand
I cannot be called upon to know a negative or to prove a negative. if there is a god and you prove it, that's fine. but you don't tell me you can't know that there isn't. i would say yes i know there isn't because i have been given no evidence. -- Ayn Rand
Don't think of them now. Never think of pain or danger or enemies a moment longer than is necessary to fight them. You're here. It's our time and our life, not theirs. Don't struggle not to be happy. You are.
- John Gault -- Ayn Rand
[T]he only real moral crime that one man can commit against another is the attempt to create, by his words or actions, an impression of the contradictory, the impossible, the irrational, and thus shake the concept of rationality in his victim. -- Ayn Rand
Since life requires a specific course of action, any other course will destroy it. A being who does not hold his own life as the motive and goal of his actions, is acting on the motive and standard of death. -- Ayn Rand
Any refusal to recognize reality, for any reason whatever, has disastrous consequences. There are no evil thoughts except one: the refusal to think. Don't ignore your own desires ... Don't sacrifice them. Examine their cause. -- Ayn Rand
In the many months of his absence, she never wondered whether he was true to her or not; she knew he was. She knew, even though she was too young to know the reason, that indiscriminate desire and unselective indulgence were possible only to those who regarded sex and themselves as evil. -- Ayn Rand
superiority as superiority" - automatically denied to those who asked for explanations. -- Ayn Rand
I got the idea [for Anthem's theme] in my school days, in Soviet Russia, when I heard all the vicious attacks on individualism, and asked myself what the world would be like if men lost the word 'I.' -- Ayn Rand
She noted that the sense of detachment one feels when looking at the earth from a plane was the same sense she felt when looking at people: only her distance from people seemed longer. -- Ayn Rand
You'll get everything society can give a man. You'll keep all the money. You'll take any fame or honor anyone might want to grant. You'll accept such gratitude as the tenants might feel. And I - I'll take what nobody can give a man, except himself. I will have built Cortlandt.
- Howard Roark -- Ayn Rand
There is no conflict of interests among men, neither in business nor in trade nor in their most personal desires - if they omit the irrational from their view of the possible and destruction from their view of the practical? -- Ayn Rand
Whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man's nature and of life's potential. -- Ayn Rand
The man who is proudly certain of his own value, will want the highest type of woman he can find, the woman he admires, the strongest, the hardest to conquer - because only the possession of a heroine will give him the sense of an achievement, not the possession of a brainless slut. -- Ayn Rand
Notice the malice toward an independent man. Look back at your own life. Howard, and at the people you've met. They know. They're afraid. You're a reproach. -- Ayn Rand
I don't know what they did to him to make him sign, but I know that it must have been something terrible. Everybody thinks so. Everybody's whispering about it, wondering what sort of pressure was used on him. . -- Ayn Rand
One gains a profoundly personal, selfish joy from the mere existence of the person one loves. It is one's own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns and derives from love. -- Ayn Rand
In order to deal with reality successfully - to pursue and achieve the values which his life requires - man needs self-esteem; he needs to be confident of his efficacy and worth. -- Ayn Rand
I hate incompetence. I think it's probably the only thing I do hate. But it didn't make me want to rule people. Nor to teach them anything. It made me want to do my own work in my own way and let myself be torn to pieces if necessary. -- Ayn Rand
We are fornicating in the sight of six billion people. -- Ayn Rand
I am not brave enough to be a coward," she said. "I see the consequences too clearly -- Ayn Rand
If, to him, love was a celebration of one's self and of existence - then, to the self-haters and life-haters, the pursuit of destruction was the only form and equivalent of love. -- Ayn Rand
The fundamental evil of government grants is the fact that men are forced to pay for the support of ideas diametrically opposed to their own. This is a profound violation of an individual's integrity and conscience. -- Ayn Rand
Concept of what he wants: money will not give him a code of values, if he's evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he's evaded the choice of what to seek. -- Ayn Rand
Genius is an exaggeration of dimension. So is elephantiasis. Both may be only a disease. -- Ayn Rand
He never felt lonliness except when he was happy. -- Ayn Rand
Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man's values, it has to be earned. -- Ayn Rand
I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction. -- Ayn Rand
Moments later, when she saw the look of control returning to his face, she said, Don't ever get angry at a man for stating the truth. -- Ayn Rand
I love doing it. Every building is like a person. Single and unrepeatable. -- Ayn Rand
I write - and read - for the sake of the story ... My basic test for any story is: 'Would I want to meet these characters and observe these events in real life? Is this story an experience worth living through for its own sake? Is the pleasure of contemplating these characters an end itself? -- Ayn Rand
He had a big head and a face so ugly it became almost fascinating. -- Ayn Rand
Your life, your achievement, your happiness, your person are of paramount importance. Live up to your highest vision of yourself no matter what the circumstances you might encounter. An exalted view of self-esteem is a man's most admirable quality. -- Ayn Rand
He asked simply, as if the matter of her presence were not unusual at all: "Did you have a hard time climbing those stairs?" She answered, "A little. All climbing is hard. But it's usually worth it. -- Ayn Rand
Dagny, we can never lose the things we live for. We may have to change their form at times, if we've made an error, but the purpose remains the same and the forms are ours to make. -- Ayn Rand
Life is achievement ... Give yourself an aim, something you want to do, then go after it, breaking through everything, with nothing in mind but your aim, all will, all concentration, and get it. -- Ayn Rand
A process of reason is a process of constant choice in answer to the question: True or False? - Right or Wrong? -- Ayn Rand
The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments. -- Ayn Rand
Do not cry that it is our duty to serve you. We do not recognize such duty. Do not cry that you need us. We do not consider need a claim. Do not cry that you own us. You don't. -- Ayn Rand
Altruism does not mean mere kindness or generosity, but the sacrifice of the best among men to the worst, the sacrifice of virtues to flaws, of ability to incompetence, of progress to stagnation-and the subordinating of all life and of all values to the claims of anyone's suffering. -- Ayn Rand
Productive work is the central purpose of a rational man's life, the central value that integrates and determines the hierarchy of all his other values. Reason is the source, the precondition of his productive work, pride is the result. -- Ayn Rand
Reality is that which exists; the unreal does not exist; the unreal is merely that negation of existence which is the content of a human consciousness when it attempts to abandon reason. Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man's only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth. -- Ayn Rand
Ask yourself what it is that a code of moral values does to a man's life, and why he can't exist without it, and what happens to him if he accepts the wrong standard, by which the evil is the good. -- Ayn Rand
he was seeing the eyes of youth looking at the future with no uncertainty or fear. -- Ayn Rand
Why does the number of those others take the place of truth? Why is truth made a mere matter of arithmetic - and only of addition at that? -- Ayn Rand
To what level of depravity has a society descended when it condemns a man simply because he is strong and great? -- Ayn Rand
It is not advisable, James, to venture unsolicited opinions. You should spare yourself the embarrassing discovery of their exact value to your listener." | S1C5 -- Ayn Rand
She saw both serenity and suffering in the calm of his face, an expression like a smile of pain, though he was not smiling ... He did not look like a man bearing torture now, but like a man who sees that which makes the torture worth bearing. -- Ayn Rand
Well, whose opinion did you take?"
"I don't ask for opinions."
"What do you go by?"
"Judgment."
"Well, whose judgment did you take?"
"Mine."
"But whom did you consult about it?"
"Nobody. -- Ayn Rand
Throughout his life, whenever he became convinced that a course of action was right, the desire to follow it had come automatically. -- Ayn Rand
Since time immemorial and pre-industrial, 'greed' has been the accusation hurled at the rich by the concrete-bound illiterates who were unable to conceive of the source of wealth or of the motivation of those who produce it. -- Ayn Rand
Ethics is a code of values which guide our choices and actions and determine the purpose and course of our lives. -- Ayn Rand
Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard - the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money - the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. -- Ayn Rand
No matter what night preceded it, she had never known a morning when she did not feel the rise of a quiet excitement that became a tightening energy in her body and a hunger for action in her mind - because this was the beginning of day and it was a day of her life. -- Ayn Rand
Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies...It is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the concept of 'Value' possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil. -- Ayn Rand
I cannot stand Tolstoy, and reading him was the most boring literary duty I ever had to perform, his philosophy and his sense of life are not merely mistaken, but evil, and yet, from a purely literary viewpoint, on his own terms, I have to evaluate him as a good writer. -- Ayn Rand
So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another - their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun. -- Ayn Rand
Only when you can feel contempt for your own priceless little ego, only then can you achieve the true, broad peace of selflessness, the merging of your spirit with the vast collective spirit of mankind. There is no room for the love of others within the tight, crowded miser's hole of a private ego. -- Ayn Rand
When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit. -- Ayn Rand
I will not die, it's the world that will end.
paraphrase of unknown philosopher -- Ayn Rand
It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money - and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it. -- Ayn Rand
When she had gone upstairs, he walked to a window and stood looking up at the sky. His head thrown back, he felt the pull of his throat muscles and he wondered whether the peculiar solemnity of looking at the sky comes, not from what one contemplates, but from that uplift of one's head. -- Ayn Rand
Wynand's face was more than the face of a stranger: a stranger's face is an unapproached potentiality, to be opened if one makes the choice and effort; this was a face known, closed and never to be reached again. -- Ayn Rand
The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, and to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law. -- Ayn Rand
He seemed casually at home, as if he felt that the place belonged to them, as they always felt wherever they went together. -- Ayn Rand
Another current catch-phrase is the complaint that the nations of the world are divided into 'haves' and the 'have-nots.' Observe that the 'haves' are those who have freedom, and that it is freedom that the 'have-nots' have not. -- Ayn Rand
And the desire would never be satisfied, except by a being of equal greatness. -- Ayn Rand
Never place your punch at the beginning of a column nor at the end. Sneak it in where it's least expected. Fill a whole column with drivel, just to get in that one important line. -- Ayn Rand
Your soul has a single basic function-the act of valuing. -- Ayn Rand
Men have been taught that the ego is the synonym of evil, and selflessness the ideal of virtue. But the creator is the egotist in the absolute sense, and the selfless man is the one who does not think, feel, judge or act. These are functions of the self. -- Ayn Rand
Let's stop and think for a moment. Is sacrifice a virtue? Can a man sacrifice his integrity? His honor? His freedom? His ideal? His convictions? The honesty of his feeling? The independence of his thought? -- Ayn Rand
Don't help me or serve me, but let me see it once, because I need it. Don't work for my happiness, my brothers-show me yours-show me that it is possible-show me your achievement-and the knowledge will give me the courage for mine. Mallory (the young artist) to Roark in "The Fountainhead" -- Ayn Rand
We wish nothing, save to be alone and to learn, and to feel as if with each day our sight were growing sharper than the hawk's and clearer than rock crystal. -- Ayn Rand
In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. -- Ayn Rand
In your worst and darkest moments remember that you have seen another kind of world. Remember that you can reach it whenever you choose to see. Remember that it will be waiting and that it's real, it's possible - it's yours. -- Ayn Rand
They did not speak. Once, she said suddenly, "Mr. Galt." "Yes?" "No. Nothing. I just wanted to know whether you were still there." "I will always be there. -- Ayn Rand
Accepting a man's hospitality is a token of good will, a declaration that you and your host stand on terms of a civilized relationship. -- Ayn Rand
Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgement and nothing can help you escape it - that no substitute can do your thinking, as no pinch-hitter can live your life. -- Ayn Rand
Observe, in politics, that the term extremism has become a synonym of "evil," regardless of the content of the issue (the evil is not what you are extreme about, but that you are "extreme" - i.e., consistent). -- Ayn Rand
I had been opposed to the practice of dedicating books; I had held that a book is addressed to any reader who proves worthy of it. -- Ayn Rand
I used to call people, then I got into e-mailing, then texting, and now I just ignore everyone. -- Ayn Rand
She looked slowly about her, noting every object and the reason for its presence. -- Ayn Rand
Why do they always teach us that it's easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It's the hardest thing in the world
to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want. -- Ayn Rand
And suddenly that we were laughing out loud, laughing as if there were no power left in us save laughter. -- Ayn Rand
I win by means of nothing but logic and I surrender to nothing but logic. I do not surrender my reason or deal with men who surrender theirs. -- Ayn Rand
Men hate passion, any great passion. Henry Cameron made a mistake: he loved his work. That was why he fought. That was why he lost. -- Ayn Rand
Reason can be fought with reason. How are you going to fight the unreasonable? The trouble with you, my dear, and with most people, is that you don't have sufficient respect for the senseless. The senseless is the major factor in our lives. You have no chance if it is your enemy. -- Ayn Rand
The ' pleasure' of being drunk is obviously the pleasure of escaping from the responsibility of Consciousness. -- Ayn Rand
Independence is the only gauge of human virtue and value. What a man is and makes of himself; not what he has or hasn't done for others. There is no substitute for personal dignity. -- Ayn Rand
What I described last," said Francisco, "is any man who proclaims his right to a single penny of another man's effort. -- Ayn Rand
If life is a process of self-sustaining action, then this is the distinctly human mode of action and survival: to think--to produce--to meet the challenges of existence by a never-ending effort and inventiveness. -- Ayn Rand
Guilt is a rope that wears thin. -- Ayn Rand
It only stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master. -- Ayn Rand
What is my joy if all hands, even the unclean, can reach into it? What is my wisdom, if even the fools can dictate to me? What is my freedom, if all creatures, even the botched and the impotent, are my masters? What is my life, if I am but to bow, to agree and to obey? -- Ayn Rand
How do you always manage to decide?"
"How can you let others decide for you? -- Ayn Rand
It [ballet] projects a fragile kind of strength and a certain inflexible precision. -- Ayn Rand
There was an expert competence in his manner of working; his movements were easy, intelligently economical. -- Ayn Rand
There's nothing important on earth, except human beings. There's nothing as important about human beings as their relations to one another ... -- Ayn Rand
The first right on earth is the right of the ego. Man's first duty is to himself. His moral law is never to place his prime goal within the persons of others. His moral obligation is to do what he wishes, provided his wish does not depend primarily upon other men. -- Ayn Rand
She had ordered him out of her office, and had sat in incredulous horror before the fact that the most vicious statement she had ever heard had been uttered in a tone of moral righteousness. -- Ayn Rand
When you force a man to act against his own choice and judgment, it's his thinking that you want him to suspend. You want him to become a robot. -- Ayn Rand
It's so graceless, being a martyr. It's honoring your adversaries too much. -- Ayn Rand
Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong. -- Ayn Rand
One cannot deal with pure evil, with the naked, full-conscious evil that neither has nor seeks justification. -- Ayn Rand
I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle. -- Ayn Rand
Government holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force. -- Ayn Rand
She had been proved right so eloquently, she had thought, that comments were unnecessary. -- Ayn Rand
The ladder of success is best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity. -- Ayn Rand
back, to feel the reality of his -- Ayn Rand
The Founding Fathers were neither passive, death-worshipin g mystics nor mindless, power-seeking looters; as a political group they were a phenomenon unprecedented in history: they were thinkers who were also men of action. -- Ayn Rand
Are my characters copies of people in real life? ... Don't ever believe the stories about authors putting people into novels. That idea is a kind of joke on both authors and readers. All the readers believe that authors do it. All the authors know that it can't be done. -- Ayn Rand
The exquisite kindliness of her manner suggested that their relationship was of no possible consequence, that she could not pay him the tribute of hostility. -- Ayn Rand
There was no boasting in his manner and consciousness, no thought of comparison. His attitude was not: "I can do it better than you," but simply: "I can do it. -- Ayn Rand
Anyone else would have taken a job in an -- Ayn Rand
Ethics is not a mystic fantasy
nor a social convention
nor a dispensable, subjective luxury ... Ethics is an objective necessity of man's survival
not by the grace of the supernatural nor of your neighbors nor of your whims, but the grace of reality and the nature of life. -- Ayn Rand
Romanticism demands mastery of the primary element of fiction: the art of storytelling - which requires three cardinal qualities: ingenuity, imagination, a sense of drama. -- Ayn Rand
For the first time since her return, she felt pain, a violent pain, but it made her feel alive, because it was worth feeling. -- Ayn Rand
There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist. -- Ayn Rand
Science was born as a result and consequence of philosophy; it cannot survive without a philosophical base. If philosophy perishes, science will be next to go. -- Ayn Rand
Ordinary human concern for human distress does not manifest itself ordinarily in the form of a gun aimed at the wallets and earnings of one's neighbors. -- Ayn Rand
The source of the government's authority is "the consent of the governed." This means that the government is not the ruler, but the servant or agent of the citizens; it means that the government as such has no rights except the rights delegated to it by the citizens for a specific purpose. -- Ayn Rand
There's no surer way to destroy a man than to force him into a spot where he has to aim at not doing his best, where he has to struggle to do a bad job, day after day. -- Ayn Rand
The doctrine that 'human rights' are superior to 'property rights' simply means that some human beings have the right to make property out of others. -- Ayn Rand
Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another. -- Ayn Rand
One falls in love with the embodiment of the values that formed a person's character, which are reflected in his widest goals or smallest gestures, which create the style of his soul - the individual style of a unique, unrepeatable, irreplaceable consciousness. -- Ayn Rand
Their terror had the evasive quality of guilt: it was not the fear that comes from understanding, but from the refusal to understand. -- Ayn Rand
Oh, but I am quite resigned to taking second place in the shadow of my husband. I am humbly aware that the wife of a great man has to be contented with reflected glory - don't you think so Miss Taggart?"
"No," said Dagny, "I don't. -- Ayn Rand
He and I had always felt as if we were fellow survivors from some vanishing age or land, in the gibbering swamp of mediocrity around us. -- Ayn Rand
Here, we trade achievements, not failures - values, not needs. We're free of one another, yet we all grow together. -- Ayn Rand
Don't set out to raze all shrines, you'll frighten men. enshrine mediocrity-and the shrines are razed. -- Ayn Rand
Do I strike you as a man with a miserable inferiority complex?"
"Good God, no!"
"Only that kind of man spends his life running after women. -- Ayn Rand
What you think is an illusion created by your glands, your emotions and, in the last analysis, by the content of your stomach. That gray matter you're so proud of is like a mirror in an amusement park which transmits to you nothing but distorted signals from reality forever beyond your grasp. -- Ayn Rand
They scattered with no melody, no harmony, no rhythm to hold them. If music was emotion and emotion came from thought, then this was the scream of chaos, of the irrational, of the helpless, of man's self-abdication. -- Ayn Rand
The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other - until one day when they are suddenly declared to be the country's official ideology. -- Ayn Rand
All the evils, abuses, and iniquities, popularly ascribed to businessmen and to capitalism, were not caused by an unregulated economy or by a free market, but by government intervention into the economy. -- Ayn Rand
Actors change, but the course of the tragedy remains the same. A humanitarian who starts with declarations of love for mankind and ends with a sea of blood. -- Ayn Rand
Devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality; there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking. -- Ayn Rand
An irrational society is a society of moral cowards-
of men paralyzed by the loss of moral standards , principles, and goals -- Ayn Rand
It is fairly easy to grasp abstract moral principles; it can be very difficult to apply them to a given situation, particularly when it involves the moral character of another person.. -- Ayn Rand
There can be no compromise on moral principles. -- Ayn Rand
The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles. -- Ayn Rand
There can be no compromise on basic principles. There can be no compromise on moral issues. There can be no compromise on matters of knowledge, of truth, of rational conviction. -- Ayn Rand
Remember that rights are moral principles which define and protect a man's freedom of action, but impose no obligations on other men. -- Ayn Rand
Both of them smiled derisively. But Francisco seemed to laugh at things because he saw something much greater. Jim laughed as if he wanted to let nothing remain great. -- Ayn Rand
Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money? -- Ayn Rand
A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort, or enslaves him, or attempts to limit the freedom of his mind, or compels him to act against his own rational judgment ... is not, strictly speaking, a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang-rule. -- Ayn Rand
A stream cut across the grass, and tree branches flowed low to the ground, like a curtain of green fluid. The sound of the water stressed the silence. The distant cut of open sky made the place seem more hidden. Far above, on the crest of a hill, one tree caught the first rays of sunlight. -- Ayn Rand
A morality that holds need as a claim, holds emptiness-non-existence-as its standard of value; it rewards an absence, a defect: weakness, inability, incompetence, suffering, disease, disaster, the lack, the fault, the flaw-the zero. -- Ayn Rand
A man's ego is the fountainhead of human progress. -- Ayn Rand
They say sound never dies, but travels on in space
what happens to a man's heartbeats?
so many of them in fifty-six years
could they be gathered again, in some sort of condenser, and put to use once more? -- Ayn Rand
And what is the state but a servant and a convenience for a large number of people, just like the electric light and the plumbing system? And wouldn't it be preposterous to claim that men must exist for their plumbing, not the plumbing for the men? -- Ayn Rand
The effort he demanded of his employees was hard to perform; the effort of himself was hard to believe. -- Ayn Rand
I don't want to fight for the people, I don't want to fight against the people, I don't want to hear of the people. I want to be left alone - to live. -- Ayn Rand
Since there is no such entity as 'the public,' since the public is merely a number of individuals, any claimed or implied conflict of 'the public interest' with private intersts means that the interests of some men are to be sacrificed to the interest and wishes of others. -- Ayn Rand
The dance is the silent partner of music and participates in a division of labor: music presents a stylized version of man's consciousness in action - the dance presents a stylized version of man's body in action. -- Ayn Rand
I had felt no hatred in all the years when they rejected me. If my work was new, I had to give them time to learn, if I took pride in being first to break a trail to a height of my own, I had no right to complain if others were slow to follow. -- Ayn Rand
Selfishness does not mean only to do things for one's self. One may do things, affecting others, for his own pleasure and benefit. This is not immoral, but the highest of morality. -- Ayn Rand
To irrational principles, one cannot be loyal. Ideas that are not derived from reality cannot be consistently practiced in reality.
as quoted by Leonard Peikoff in Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand -- Ayn Rand
She sat looking at him as she always did; her glance had tenderness without scorn and sadness without pity. -- Ayn Rand
Let those who are actually concerned with peace observe that capitalism gave mankind the longest period of peace in history - a period during which there were no wars involving the entire civilized world - from the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914. -- Ayn Rand
The end does not justify the means. No one's rights can be secured by the violation of the rights of others. -- Ayn Rand
They have taught man that he is a hopeless misfit made of two elements, both symbols of death. A body without a soul is a corpse, a soul without a body is a ghost- yet such is their image of man's nature: the battleground of a struggle between a corpse and a ghost, (john Galt) -- Ayn Rand
Roark threw his head up once, for a flash of a second, to look at Heller across the table. It was all the introduction they needed; it was like a handshake. -- Ayn Rand
The only thing that can make a man do something he doesn't like is guilt -- Ayn Rand
You always play it open, don't you?" he asked.
"I've never noticed you doing otherwise."
"I thought I was the only one who could afford to. -- Ayn Rand
Sacrifice is the surrender of that which you value in favor of which you dont -- Ayn Rand
Don't worry. They're all against me. But I have one advantage: they don't know what they want. I do. -- Ayn Rand
I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine. -- Ayn Rand
The Council of Schools has said that there are no mysteries. -- Ayn Rand
There are no little people in America. There are only people, equal before the law, yearning to breathe free and wanting to achieve the best within them. -- Ayn Rand
The first society in history whose leaders were neither Attilas nor Witch Doctors, a society led, dominated and created by the Producers, was the United States of America. -- Ayn Rand
Capitalism is based on individual rights - not on the sacrifice of the individual to the 'public good' of the collective. -- Ayn Rand
This sense of eagerness, of hope and of secret excitement. It was as if normal existence were a photograph of shapeless things in badly printed colors, but this was a sketch done in a few sharp strokes that made things seem clean, important - and worth doing. -- Ayn Rand
The fortune my spirit is not to be blown into coins of brass and flung to the winds as alms for the poor of the spirit. I guard my treasures: my thought, my will, my freedom. And the greatest of these is freedom. -- Ayn Rand
There is no
room for the love of others within the tight, crowded miser's hole of a private
ego. Be empty in order to be filled. 'He that loveth his life shall lose it; and
he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal. -- Ayn Rand
They kept their secret from the knowledge of others, not as a shameful guilt, but as a thing that was immaculately theirs, beyond anyone's right of debate or appraisal. -- Ayn Rand
Every form of happiness if one, every desire is driven by the same motor
by our love for a single value, for the highest potentiality of our own existence
and every achievement is an expression of it. -- Ayn Rand
All that which proceeds from man's independent ego is good. All that which proceeds from man's dependence upon men is evil. -- Ayn Rand
Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman's tool is values; the bureaucrat's tool is fear. -- Ayn Rand
I had made my fortune by being able to spot a certain kind of man. The kind who never asked you for faith, hope and charity, but offered you facts, proof and profit. -- Ayn Rand
The power of the sky can be made to do men's bidding. There are no limits to its secrets and its might, and it can be made to grant us anything if we but choose to ask. -- Ayn Rand
A man who surrenders his value is at mercy of anyone's will. -- Ayn Rand
When one turns from reason to faith, when one rejects the absolutism of reality, one undercuts the absolutism of one's consciousness - and one's mind becomes an organ one cannot trust any longer. It becomes what the mystics claim it to be: a tool of distortion. -- Ayn Rand
My hands ... My spirit ... My sky ... My forest ... This earth of mine ... -- Ayn Rand
whatever we are, it's we who move the world and it's we who'll pull it through. -- Ayn Rand
Men differ in their virtues, if any," said Gail Wynand, explaining his policy, "but they are alike in their vices. -- Ayn Rand
And I wish I had the power to tell tem that the despair of their hearts was not to be final, and their night was not without hope. For the battle they lost can never be lost. -- Ayn Rand
To interpose the threat of physical destruction between a man and his perception of reality, is to negate and paralyze his means of survival to force him to act against his own judgment, is like forcing him to act against his own sight -- Ayn Rand
She's a writer. The kind of writer who wouldn't be published outside. She believes that when one deals with words, one deals with the mind. -- Ayn Rand
If you came here dressed like this in order not to let me notice how lovely you are," he said, "you miscalculated. You're lovely. I wish I could tell you what a relief it is to see a face that's intelligent though a woman's. But you don't want to hear it. That's not what you came here for. -- Ayn Rand
Integrity does not consist of loyalty to ones subjective whims, but of loyalty to rational principles -- Ayn Rand
It's only a matter of getting through the next few moments, she thought: take care of the next few moments, and then the next, a few at a time, and after a while it will be easier; you'll get over it, after a while. -- Ayn Rand
But don't I have any freedom of speech?"
"In your own house. Not in mine."
"Don't I have a right to my own ideas?"
"At your own expense. Not at mine."
"Don't you tolerate any differences of opinion?"
"Not when I'm paying the bills. -- Ayn Rand
Any material element or resource which, in order to become of use or value to men, requires the application of human knowledge and effort, should be private property-by the right of those who apply the knowledge and effort. -- Ayn Rand
Whoever, to whatever purpose or extent, initiates the use of force, is a killer acting on the premise of death in a manner wider than murder: the premise of destroying man's capacity to live. -- Ayn Rand
Just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted - and you create a nation of lawbreakers - and then you cash in on guilt. -- Ayn Rand
When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. -- Ayn Rand
My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose. -- Ayn Rand
She fell asleep, lying there, her hand clasping his. Her last awareness, before she surrendered the responsibility of consciousness, was the sense of an enormous void, the void of a city and of a continent, where she would never be able to find the man whom she had no right to seek. -- Ayn Rand
Man's unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself. -- Ayn Rand
Only the man who extols the purity of love devoid of desire, is capable of the depravity of a desire devoid of love. -- Ayn Rand
I want to be prepared to claim the greatest virtue of all - that I was a man who made money -- Ayn Rand
If capitalism had never existed, any honest humanitarian should have been struggling to invent it. But when you see men struggling to evade its existence, to misrepresent its nature, and to destroy its last remnants - you maybe sure that whatever their motives, love of man is not one of them. -- Ayn Rand
There was nothing she could say to them
nothing would be heard or answered. What were the weapons, she thought, in a realm where reason was not a weapon any longer? It was a realm she could not enter. -- Ayn Rand
It was the greatest sensation of existence: not to trust but to know. -- Ayn Rand
In order to fight any issue, it is necessary to fight for something, not merely against something. -- Ayn Rand
Roark looked at him and understood. Roark inclined his head in agreement; he could acknowledge what Cameron had just declared to him only by a quiet glance as solemn as Cameron's. -- Ayn Rand
It is forbidden, not to be happy. For, as it has been explained to us, men are free and the earth belongs to them; and all things on earth belong to all men; and the will of all men together is good for all; and so all men must be happy. Yet -- Ayn Rand
Seeking God - and finding itself. -- Ayn Rand
Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil? -- Ayn Rand
No group has any proper intellectual leadership today or any proper representation. -- Ayn Rand
When the common good of a society is regarded as something apart from and superior to the individual good of its members, it means that the good of some men takes precedence over the good of others, with those others consigned to the status of sacrificial animals. -- Ayn Rand
And love is exception-making. If you were in love you'd want to be broken, trampled, ordered, dominated, -- Ayn Rand
The sight of an achievement was the greatest gift a human being could offer to others. -- Ayn Rand
We are those who do not disconnect the values of their minds from the actions of their bodies. -- Ayn Rand
It is here, it exists - but one must enter it naked and alone, with no rags from the falsehoods of centuries, with the purest clarity of mind - not an innocent heart, but that which is much rarer: an intransigent mind - as one's only possession and key. -- Ayn Rand
A free mind and a free economy are corollaries. One can't exist without the other. -- Ayn Rand
Faith and force ... are corollaries: every period of history dominated by mysticism, was a period of statism, of dictatorship, of tyranny. -- Ayn Rand
Political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries. -- Ayn Rand
Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to? -- Ayn Rand
An architect requires a great many men to erect his building. But he does not ask them to vote on his design. -- Ayn Rand
Humanity's darkest evil, the most destructive horror machine among all the devices of men, is non-objective law.. -- Ayn Rand
If parasitism, favoritism, corruption, and greed for the unearned did not exist, a mixed economy would bring them into existence. -- Ayn Rand
The most beautiful words were those which were not needed. -- Ayn Rand
We have come to see how great is the unexplored. -- Ayn Rand
Identify the dominant philosophy of a society and you can predict its future. -- Ayn Rand
The man of authentic self-confidence is the man who relies on the judgment of his own mind. Such a man is not malleable; he may be mistaken, he may be fooled in a given instance, but he is inflexible in regard to the absolutism of reality, i.e., in seeking and demanding truth. -- Ayn Rand
Make no mistake about the character of mystics. To undercut your consciousness has always been their only purpose throughout the ages - and power, the power to rule you by force, has always been their only lust (John Galt) -- Ayn Rand
Her face was made of angular planes, the shape of her mouth clear-cut, a sensual mouth held closed with inflexible precision. She kept her hands in the coat pockets, her posture taut, as if she resented immobility ... -- Ayn Rand
There is no necessity for pain-why, then, is the worst pain reserved for those who will not accept its necessity? -- Ayn Rand
He saw the tension of the face, the speed of the walk, the drunken exhilaration of the body, drunk on the energy of sleepless nights, the proud lift of the head, the clear, steady, ruthless eyes, the eyes of a man who drove himself without pity toward that which he wanted. -- Ayn Rand
A code that forbids you to cast the first stone, has forbidden you to admit the identity of stones and to know when or if you're being stoned. -- Ayn Rand
It was the ultimate form of our admiration for each other, with full knowledge of the values by which we made our choice. -- Ayn Rand
If I ever want to punish myself for something terrible, if I ever want to punish myself disgustingly - I'll marry you." She added: "Consider it a promise. -- Ayn Rand
If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject. -- Ayn Rand
If a businessman makes a mistake, he suffers the consequences. If a bureaucrat makes a mistake, you suffer the consequences. -- Ayn Rand
If one's actions are honest, one does not need the predated confidence of others. -- Ayn Rand
In spiritual issues
(by "spiritual" I mean: "pertaining to man's consciousness")
a trader is a man who does not seek to be loved for his weaknesses or flaws, only for his virtues, and who does not grant his love to the weaknesses or the flaws of others, only to their virtues. -- Ayn Rand
This is pity, he thought, and then he lifted his head in wonder. He thought that there must be something terribly wrong with a world in which this monstrous feeling is called a virtue. -- Ayn Rand
I shall choose friends among men, but neither slaves nor masters. And I shall choose only such as please me, and them I shall love and respect, but neither command nor obey. And we shall join our hands when we wish, or walk alone when we so desire. -- Ayn Rand
Every man builds his world in his own image; he has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice. If he abdicates his power, he abdicates the status of man, and the grinding chaos of the irrational is what he achieves as his sphere of existence - by his own choice. -- Ayn Rand
Collectivism, as an intellectual power and a moral ideal, is dead. But freedom and individualism, and their political expression, capitalism, have not yet been discovered. -- Ayn Rand
An idea is a light turned on in a man's soul. Comic-strip artists are in the habit of representing it by means of a light bulb flashing on, above the head of a character who has suddenly grasped an idea. In simple, primitive terms, this is an appropriate symbol. -- Ayn Rand
I'm so hungry for any sight of anyone who's able to do whatever it is he's doing! -- Ayn Rand
She did not know the nature of her loneliness. The only words that named it were: This is not the world I expected. -- Ayn Rand
I won't say that we couldn't get along without you - we can. I won't beg you to stay here for our sake - I didn't think I'd ever revert to that rotten old plea, but, boy! - what a temptation it was, I can almost see why people do it. I -- Ayn Rand
Whoever defends his own rights defends the rights of all. -- Ayn Rand
Man, whose tool of survival is the mind, does not merely fail to teach a child to think, but devotes the child's education to the purpose of destroying his brain, of convincing him that thought is futile and evil, before he has started to think. -- Ayn Rand
I have never felt guilty of my ability. I have never felt guilty of my mind. I have never felt guilty of being a man. I accepted no unearned guilt, and thus was free to earn and to know my own value. -- Ayn Rand
Instead of prosperity, socialism has brought economic paralysis and/or collapse to every country that tried it. The degree of socialization has been the degree of disaster. The consequences have varied accordingly. -- Ayn Rand
I think of man's magnificent capacity that created this ship to conquer all that senseless space. When I look at mountain peaks, I think of tunnels and dynamite. When I look at the planets, I think of airplanes -- Ayn Rand
Let me by the child in that story and declare that the Emperor is naked-or that America is culturally bankrupt. -- Ayn Rand
Man's basic vice, the source of all his evils, is the act of unfocusing his mind, the suspension of his consciousness, which is not blindness, but the refusal to see, not ignorance, but the refusal to know. -- Ayn Rand
It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment - on the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the verdict 'It is. -- Ayn Rand
It is morally obscene to regard wealth as an anonymous, tribal product and to talk about 'redistributing' it. -- Ayn Rand
In art, and in literature, the end and the means, or the subject and the style, must be worthy of each other.
That which is not worth contemplating in life, is not worth re-creating in art. -- Ayn Rand
Miss Taggart," he said, with an odd note of sternness in his voice, "just remember that he represented a code of existence which - for a brief span in all human history - drove slavery out of the civilized world. Remember it, when you feel baffled by the nature of his enemies. -- Ayn Rand
[S]tatism is a system of institutionalized violence and perpetual civil war. It leaves men no choice but to fight to seize political power
to rob or be robbed, to kill or be killed ... Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by production. -- Ayn Rand
Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. -- Ayn Rand
My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute. -- Ayn Rand
Ask anything of men. Ask them to achieve wealth, fame, love, brutality, murder, self-sacrifice. But don't ask them to achieve self-respect. They will hate your soul. -- Ayn Rand
We are one ... alone ... and only ... and we love you who are one ... alone ... and only. We looked into each other's eyes and we knew the breath of a miracle had touched us, and fled, and left us groping vainly. And we felt torn, torn for some word we could not find. -- Ayn Rand
He walked, groping for a sentence that hung in his mind as an empty shape. He could neither fill it or dismiss it. -- Ayn Rand
One method of destroying a concept is by diluting its meaning. Observe that by ascribing rights to the unborn, i.e., the nonliving, the anti-abortionists obliterate the rights of the living. -- Ayn Rand
The moral cannibalism of all hedonist and altruist doctrines lies in the premise that the happiness of one man necessitates the injury of another. -- Ayn Rand
Whether you know the shape of a pebble or the structure of a solar system, the anxioms remain the same: that it exists and that you know it. -- Ayn Rand
It [ballet] is a perfect medium for the expression of spiritual love. -- Ayn Rand
Thousands of years ago the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burnt at the stake he'd taught his brothers to light, but he left them a gift they had not conceived and he lifted darkness from the face of the Earth. -- Ayn Rand
People, he thought, were as hungry for a sight of joy as he had always been
for a moment's relief from that gray load of suffering which seemed so inexplicable and unnecessary. He had never been able to understand why men should be unhappy. -- Ayn Rand
There, he thought, was the final abortion of the creed of collective interdependence, the creed of non-identity, non-property, non-fact: the belief that the moral stature of one is at the mercy of the action of another. -- Ayn Rand
You have been paying blackmail, not for your vices, but for your virtues. -- Ayn Rand
It had been said that men develop brains when they have failed in everything else. -- Ayn Rand
Ideas are the greatest and most crucially practical power on earth. -- Ayn Rand
There's only one passion in most artists more violent than their desire for admiration: their fear of identifying the nature of such admiration as they do receive. -- Ayn Rand
The crowd had stared at him and given up angrily, finding no satisfaction. He did not look crushed and he did not look defiant. He looked impersonal and calm. He was not like a public figure in a public place; he was like a man alone in his own room, listening to the radio. -- Ayn Rand
Nature is not to be conquered, man is. -- Ayn Rand
The vase was a solid, dark green stone carved into plain surfaces; the texture of its smooth curves provoked an irresistible desire to touch it. It seemed startling in that office, incongruous with the sternness of the rest: it was a touch of sensuality. -- Ayn Rand
Professional intellectuals are the voice of a culture and are, therefore, its leaders, its integrators and its bodyguards. -- Ayn Rand
He had not liked the things taught to him in college. He had been taught a great deal about social responsibility, about a life of service and self-sacrifice. Everybody had said it was beautiful and inspiring. Only he had not felt inspired. He had felt nothing at all. -- Ayn Rand
Only a man of integrity can possess the virtue of honesty, since only the faking of one's consciousness can permit the faking of existence. -- Ayn Rand
And here, over the portals of my fort, I shall cut in the stone the word which is to be my beacon and my banner. The word which will not die should we all perish in battle. The word which can never die on this earth, for it is the heart of it and the meaning and the glory.
The sacred word:
EGO -- Ayn Rand
She moved through formal receptions, theater parties, dinners, dances - gracious and smiling, a smile that made her face brighter and colder, like the sun on a winter day. -- Ayn Rand
The course led them to the moment when, in answer to the highest of one's values, one's spirit makes one's body become the tribute, recasting it
as proof, as sanction, as reward
into a single sensation of such intensity of joy that no other sanction of one's existence is necessary. -- Ayn Rand
Face a challenge and find joy in the capacity to meet it. -- Ayn Rand
Have you felt it too? Have you seen how your best friends love everything about you- except the things that count? And your most important is nothing to them; nothing, not even a sound they can recognize. -- Ayn Rand
It is not proper for man's life to be a circle, she thought, or a string of circles dropping off like zeros behind him - man's life must be a straight line of motion from goal to farther goal, each leading to the next and to a single growing sum. -- Ayn Rand
She sat at the window of the train, her head thrown back, one leg stretched across to the empty seat before her. The window frame trembled with the speed of the motion, the pane hung over empty darkness, and dots of light slashed across the glass as luminous streaks, once in a while. -- Ayn Rand
He felt as if there was something - deep in his brain, behind everything he thought and everything he was - which he did not know, but she knew, and he wished he did, and wondered whether he could ever know it, and should he, if he could, and why he wished it. -- Ayn Rand
It was the only lie she ever told. She did not do it to protect Francisco; she did it because she felt, for some reason which she could not define, that the incident was a secret too precious to share. -- Ayn Rand
Man's life is the standard of morality, but your own life is its purpose . If existence on earth is your goal, you must choose your actions and values by the standard of that which is proper to man - for the purpose of preserving, fulfilling and enjoying the irreplaceable value which is your life. -- Ayn Rand
We didn't really have to take everything so seriously, did we? -- Ayn Rand
To me there's only one form of human depravity-the man without a purpose. -- Ayn Rand
(I really believe that a building is a unit, not a city, so that city planning should not control all buildings. Because a house can be the product of one man, but a city cannot. And nothing collective can have the unity and integrity of a "unit.") -- Ayn Rand
Only the pleasure which proceeds from a rational value judgement can be regarded as moral, pleasure, as such, is not a guide to action nor a standard of morality. -- Ayn Rand
I'm going to die, he said aloud
and yawned. He felt no relief, no despair, no fear. The moment of his end would not grant him even the dignity of seriousness. It was an anonymous moment; a few minutes ago, he had held a toothbrush in that hand; now he held a gun with the same casual indifference. -- Ayn Rand
But you see, the measure of hell you're able to endure is the measure of your love. -- Ayn Rand
Let us destroy, but don't let us pretend that we are commiting an act of virtue. -- Ayn Rand
A wall of the most effective soundproofing: indifference. -- Ayn Rand
You knew better than that. And it's such an old one to me. My antisocial stubbornness is so well-known that I didn't think anyone would waste time trying to tempt me again. -- Ayn Rand
At a time like this, we can't afford the luxury of thinking! -- Ayn Rand
Logic rests on the axiom that existence exists. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification. -- Ayn Rand
It is not as late as you think. It is merely early - in the age of the rebirth of individualism. -- Ayn Rand
She thought: at this moment, the glass stem between his fingers feels just like the one between mine. We have this much in common. -- Ayn Rand
I think that your sister is awful. I think it's disgusting-a woman acting like a grease-monkey and posing around like a big executive. It's so unfeminine. Who does she think she is, anyway? -- Ayn Rand
He had the ease of an expert, so confident that it seemed casual, but it was the ease of a tremendous concentration, the concentration on one's task that has the ruthlessness of an absolute. -- Ayn Rand
I am not looking for intelligent disagreement any longer ... What I am looking for is intelligent agreement. -- Ayn Rand
An emotion as much tells you nothing about reality, beyond the fact that something makes you feel something. -- Ayn Rand
Nobody stays in this valley except by a full, conscious choice based on a full, conscious knowledge of every fact involved in his decision. Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever. -- Ayn Rand
She had always been ... the motive power of her own happiness. -- Ayn Rand
He was accustomed to hostility; this kind of benevolence was more offensive than hostility. He shrugged; he thought that he would be out of here soon and back in the simple, clean reality of his own office. -- Ayn Rand
If men like Boyle think that force is all they need to rob their betters - let them see what happens when one of their betters chooses to resort to force. -- Ayn Rand
No speech is ever considered, but only the speaker. It's so much easier to pass judgement on a man than on an idea. -- Ayn Rand
So long as road lies before us, and what care we if we must travel it alone! -- Ayn Rand
We the Living is not a novel 'about Soviet Russia.' It is a novel about Man against the State. Its basic theme is the sanctity of human life - using the word 'sanctity' not in a mystical sense, but in the sense of 'supreme value.' -- Ayn Rand
Rationalization is a process of not perceiving reality, but of attempting to make reality fit one's emotions. -- Ayn Rand
There is only one source of authentic self-confidence: reason. -- Ayn Rand
There was so calm, so natural, so total a certainty in the sound of her voice that the mere sound seemed to carry an immense persuasiveness. -- Ayn Rand
There's something in me that knows of a life I've never lived, the kind of a life no one has ever lived, but should." "You know it? Why don't you live it? -- Ayn Rand
My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists - and in a single choice: to live. -- Ayn Rand
There is a fundamental conviction which some people never acquire, some hold only in their youth, and a few hold to the end of their days-the conviction that ideas matter ... That ideas matter means that knowledge matters, that truth matters, that one's mind matters ... -- Ayn Rand
Let no man posture as an advocate of peace if he proposes or supports any social system that initiates the use of force against individual men, in any form. -- Ayn Rand
Keating leaned back with a sense of warmth and well-being. He liked this book. It had made the routine of his Sunday morning breakfast a profound spiritual experience; he was certain that it was profound, because he didn't understand it. -- Ayn Rand
One's own independent judgment is the means by which one must choose one's actions, but it is not a moral criterion nor a moral validation; only reference to a demonstrable principle can validate one's choices. -- Ayn Rand
Bill Brent knew nothing about epistemology; but he knew that man must live by his own rational perception of reality, that he cannot act against it or escape it or find a substitute for it - and that there is no other way for him to live. He -- Ayn Rand
a new biological species, the hit-and-run businessmen, who did not stay in any line of business longer than the span of one deal, who had no payrolls to meet, no overhead to carry, no real estate to own, no equipment to build, whose -- Ayn Rand
He looked at her with a touch of defiance, as if waiting for an angry answer. But her answer was worse than anger: her face remained expressionless, as if the truth or falsehood of his convictions were of no concern to her any longer. -- Ayn Rand
Men have been taught that their first concern is to relieve the suffering of others ... To make that the highest test of virtue is to make suffering the most important part of life. Then man must wish to see others suffer in order that he may be virtuous. Such is the nature of altruism. -- Ayn Rand
She thought of the world's code that worshipped white lies as an act of mercy - she felt a stab of revulsion against that code.. -- Ayn Rand
The structures were austere and simple, until one looked at them and realized what work, what complexity of method, what tension of thought had achieved the simplicity. -- Ayn Rand
What are you laughing at?"
"It's wonderful."
"What?"
"The way you don't react as everybody else does nowadays. -- Ayn Rand
One does not bargain over inches of evil. -- Ayn Rand
I'll give you a hint. Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong." "Francisco, -- Ayn Rand
Thanksgiving is a typically American holiday ... The lavish meal is a symbol of the fact that abundant consumption is the result and reward of production. -- Ayn Rand
Who pays for the orgy? -- Ayn Rand
It [Romanticism] is concerned - in the words of Aristotle - not with things as they are, but with things as they might be and ought to be. -- Ayn Rand
It was a strange glance; she had noticed it before; a glance of simple worship. And it made her realize that there is a stage of worship which makes the worshiper himself an object of reverence. -- Ayn Rand
Dagny, why is it that most women would never admit that, but you do?"
"Because they're never sure that they ought to be wanted. I am."
"I do admire self-confidence."
"Self-confidence was only one part of what I said, Hank."
"What's the whole?"
"Confidence of my value - and yours. -- Ayn Rand
Defiance, not obedience, is the American's answer to overbearing authority. -- Ayn Rand
It was as if a volcano were cracking open, yet the people at the foot of the mountain ignored the sudden fissures, the black fumes, the boiling trickles, and went on believing that their only danger was to acknowledge the reality of these signs. -- Ayn Rand
Reason is your means of survival - so that for you, who are a human being, the question 'to be or not to be' is the question 'to think or not to think..'. -- Ayn Rand
The strip of earthy, faintly visible outside the window, was running faster now, blending into a gray stream. Through the dry phrases of calculations in her mind, she noticed that she did have time to feel something: it was the hard, exhilarating pleasure of action. -- Ayn Rand
I am the man who loves his life. I am the man who does not sacrifice his love or his values. -- Ayn Rand
Altruism declares that any action taken for the benefit of others is good, and any action taken for one's own benefit is evil. Thus the beneficiary of an action is the only criterion of moral value - and so long as that beneficiary is anybody other than oneself, anything goes. -- Ayn Rand
Her leg, sculptured by the tight sheen of the stocking, its long line running straight, over an arched instep, to the tip of a foot in a high-heeled pump, had a feminine elegance that seemed out of place in the dusty train car ... -- Ayn Rand
But neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. -- Ayn Rand
You need no proof, no reasons, no success, you need not achieve in fact the good of others - all you need to know is that your motive was the good of others, not your own. Your only definition of the good is a negation: the good is the 'non-good for me. -- Ayn Rand
Sacrifice does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious -- Ayn Rand
The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word 'selfishness' is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual 'package-deal,' which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind. -- Ayn Rand
One must never allow oneself to acquire an exaggerated sense of one's own importance. There's no necessity to burden oneself with absolutes -- Ayn Rand
Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future. -- Ayn Rand
For the coming of that day shall I fight, I and my sons and my chosen friends. For the freedom of Man. For his rights. For his life. For his honor. -- Ayn Rand
No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the sum of his knowledge. -- Ayn Rand
God, I've missed you! he said, and knew that he had, every day since he'd seen her last and most of all, perhaps on the days when he had not thought of her -- Ayn Rand
He stood looking at her. She knew that he did not see her. No, she thought, it was not that exactly. He always looked straight at people and his damnable eyes never missed a thing, it was only that he made people feel as if they did not exist. He just stood looking. -- Ayn Rand
No one can tell men what they must live for. No one can take that right - because there are things in men, in the best of us, which are above all states, above all collectives! -- Ayn Rand
They're not going anywhere, they're escaping. And I don't think they know what it is that they want to escape. -- Ayn Rand
If you want to save capitalism there is only one type of argument that you should adopt, the only one that has ever won in any moral issue: the argument from self-esteem. Check your premises, convince yourself of the rightness of your cause, then fight for capitalism with full, moral certainty. -- Ayn Rand
And now, sitting here in our tunnel, we wonder about these words. It is forbidden, not to be happy. -- Ayn Rand
Rationality is the recognition of the fact that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it. -- Ayn Rand
He, too, stood looking at her for a moment
and it seemed to her that it was not a look of greeting after an absence, but the look of someone who had thought of her every day of that year. She could not be certain, it was only an instant, so brief that just as she caught it, he was turning ... -- Ayn Rand
That doesn't matter. Not even that they'll destroy it. Only that it had existed." She -- Ayn Rand
She had always looked for sparks of competence, like a diamond prospector in an unpromising wasteland. -- Ayn Rand
The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap. -- Ayn Rand
It was as if he were a single whole, grasped by her first glance at him, like some irreducible absolute, like an axiom not to be explained any further, as if she knew everything about him by direct perception, and what awaited her now was only the process of identifying her knowledge. -- Ayn Rand
She had caught the sound of suffering in the faintest exaggeration of evenness in his voice. -- Ayn Rand
He was seeing the full extent of her failure - in the immensity of his own indifference. The droning stream of her insults was like the sound of a distant riveting machine, a long, impotent pressure that reached nothing within him. -- Ayn Rand
The weather seemed afraid to take a stand and clung noncommittally to some sort of road's middle; Board of Directors' weather, she thought. -- Ayn Rand
Don't say that I'm beautiful and exquisite and like no one you've ever met before and that you're very much afraid that you're going to fall in love with me. You'll say it eventually, but let's postpone it. Apart from that, I think we'll get along very nicely. -- Ayn Rand
The laws say that none among men may be alone, ever and at any time, for this is the great transgression and the root of all evil. -- Ayn Rand
The sacred word: EGO -- Ayn Rand
She sat, bent over, her head on her arms. She did not move, but the strands of hair, hanging down to her knees, trembled in sudden jolts once in a while. -- Ayn Rand
As there can be no causeless wealth, so 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. To love is to value. -- Ayn Rand
He despised causeless affection, just as he despised unearned wealth. They professed to love him for some unknown reason and they ignored all the things for which he could wish to be loved. -- Ayn Rand
Through the years of his struggle, he had learned that an apparently causeless antagonism was not hard to deal with, but an apparently causeless solicitude was an ugly danger. -- Ayn Rand
She saw the man below looking at her, she saw the insolent hint of amusement tell her that he knew she did not want him to look at her now. She turned her head away. -- Ayn Rand
Style is not an end in itself, it is only a means to an end - the means of telling a story. -- Ayn Rand
I do not care to be admired causelessly, emotionally, intuitively, instinctively - or blindly. I do not care for blindness in any form, I have too much to show - or for deafness, I have too much to say. I do not care to be admired by anyone's heart - only by someone's head. -- Ayn Rand
She drove fast, as a matter of habit, an even speed without a sense of haste. -- Ayn Rand
It is not fools that I seek to address. -- Ayn Rand
An attempt to achieve the good by force is like an attempt to provide a man with a picture gallery at the price of cutting out his eyes. -- Ayn Rand
I can accept anything, except what seems to be the easiest for most people: the half-way, the almost, the just-about, the in-between. -- Ayn Rand
Don't you know that most people take most things because that's what's given them, and they have no opinion whatever? Do you wish to be guided by what they expect you to think they think or by your own judgment? -- Ayn Rand
Man has a single basic choice: to think or not, and that is the gauge of his virtue. Moral perfection is an unbreached rationality-not the degree of your intelligence, but the full and relentless use of your mind, not the extent of your knowledge, but the acceptance of reason as an absolute. -- Ayn Rand
They say that it's hard for men to agree. You'd be surprised how easy it is - when both parties hold as their moral absolute that neither exists for the sake of the other and that reason is their only means of trade. -- Ayn Rand
moral absolute one does not -- Ayn Rand
The moral absolute should be: if and when, in any dispute, one side initiates the use of physical force, that side is wrong - and no consideration or discussion of the issues is necessary or appropriate. -- Ayn Rand
I see man as a hero. With his own happiness as his moral obligation; productive achievementbas his noblest activity and reason as the only absolute. -- Ayn Rand
The practical implementation of friendship, affection and love consists of incorporating the welfare (the rational welfare) of the person involved into one's own hierarchy of values, then acting accordingly. -- Ayn Rand
I think that when in doubt about the truth of an issue, it's safer and in better taste to select the least numerous of the adversaries. -- Ayn Rand
Serenity comes from the ability to say "Yes" to existence. Courage comes from the ability to say "No" to the wrong choices made by others. -- Ayn Rand
No," she said, before he could utter a word, "you can't take me home. I have a car waiting. Thank you just the same. -- Ayn Rand
No man can predict the time when others will choose to return to reason. -- Ayn Rand
They had counted on his pity and dreaded his anger; they had not dared consider the third alternative: his indifference. -- Ayn Rand
Don't ever get angry at a man for stating the truth.
Dagny Taggart -- Ayn Rand
Laissez-faire capitalism is the only social system based on the recognition of individual rights and, therefore, the only system that bans force from social relationships. -- Ayn Rand
Capitalism has been called a system of greed - yet it is the system that raised the standard of living of its poorest citizens to heights no collectivist system has ever begun to equal, and no tribal gang can conceive of. -- Ayn Rand
Do not keep silent when your own ideas and values are being attacked. If a dictatorship ever comes to this country, it will be by the fault of those who keep silent. We are still free enough to speak. Do we have time? No one can tell. -- Ayn Rand
I want to drink. I want a woman like you. I want to go down, as far as you can drag me. -- Ayn Rand
The best, most natural dialogue is usually written as if the writer is listening to dictation. You might get stuck on any particular point and have to question yourself; but normally, dialogue writes itself. -- Ayn Rand
Do not help your jailers to pretend that their jail is your natural state of existence. -- Ayn Rand
She thought how strange it would be if she ever said 'Hello' to him. One did not greet oneself each morning. -- Ayn Rand
Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned -- Ayn Rand
Individual rights are not subject to a public vote. A majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority. The political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities, and the smallest minority on earth is the individual. -- Ayn Rand
The essential characteristic of socialism is the denial of individual property rights ... -- Ayn Rand
Since only an individual man can possess rights, the expression "individual rights"? is a redundancy (which one has to use for purposes of clarification in today's intellectual chaos). But the expression "collective rights"? is a contradiction in terms. -- Ayn Rand
Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law. -- Ayn Rand
America's founding Ideal was the principle of individual rights. Nothing more - and nothing less. -- Ayn Rand
Every living thing is integrated. Do you know what that means? Whole, pure, complete, unbroken. Do you know what constitutes an integrating principle? A thought. The one thought, the single thought that created the thing and every part of it. The thought which no one can change or touch. -- Ayn Rand
He's not really struggling even for material wealth, but for the second-hander's delusion - prestige. A stamp of approval, not his own. He can find no joy in the struggle and no joy when he has succeeded. -- Ayn Rand
Ferris: Are you going to be as impractical as that? Rearden: The evaluation of an action as practical, Dr. Ferris, depends on what it is that one wishes to practice. Ferris: Haven't you always placed your self-interest above all else? Rearden: That is what I am doing right now. -- Ayn Rand
The statue was of a young man with a tall, gaunt body and an angular face. He held his head as if he faced a challenge and found joy in his capacity to meet it. All that Dagny wanted of life was contained in the desire to hold her head as he did. -- Ayn Rand
Morality is a code of black and white. When and if men attempt a compromise, it is obvious which side will necessarily lose and which will necessarily profit. -- Ayn Rand
The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. -- Ayn Rand
They proclaim that every man is entitled to exist without labor and, the laws of reality to the contrary notwithstanding, is entitled to receive his 'minimum sustenance' his food, his clothes, his shelter with no effort on his part, as his due and his birthright. To receive it from whom. -- Ayn Rand
Man holds these rights [life, liberty and property], not from the Collective nor for the Collective, but against the Collective - as a barrier which the Collective cannot cross ... these rights are man's protection against all other men. -- Ayn Rand
To achieve, you need thought -- Ayn Rand
You, whom I have always loved and never found, you whom I expected to see at the end of the rails beyond the horizon - -- Ayn Rand
The view that man was ever to be drawn by some vision of the unattainable shining ahead, doomed ever to aspire, but not to achieve, my life and my values could not bring me to that. -- Ayn Rand
The public has a vital stake in natural resources, Jim, such as iron ore. The public can't remain indifferent to reckless, selfish waste by an anti-social individual. After all, private property is a trusteeship held for the benefit of society as a whole. -- Ayn Rand
No view of men except as sacrificial animals and profiteers-on-sacrifice, as victims and parasites - that it permits no concept of a benevolent co-existence -- Ayn Rand
Volumes can be and have been written about
the issue of freedom versus dictatorship,
but, in essence, it comes down to a single question:
do you consider it moral to treat men as sacrificial animals
and to rule them by physical force? -- Ayn Rand
Virtue is not an end in itself. Virtue is not its own reward or sacrificial fodder for the reward of evil. Life is the reward of virtue-and happiness is the goal and the reward of life. -- Ayn Rand
The social system based on and consonant with the altruist morality-with the code of self-sacrifice- is socialism, in all or any of its variants: fascism, Nazism, communism. All of them treat man as a sacrificial animal to be immolated for the benefit of the group, the tribe, the society, the state. -- Ayn Rand
the proof of an achieved self-esteem is your soul's shudder of contempt and rebellion against the role of a sacrificial animal, against the vile impertinence of any creed that proposes to immolate the irreplaceable value which is your consciousness and the incomparable glory which is your existence -- Ayn Rand
The fact that a man has no claim on others ... does not preclude or prohibit good will among men and does not make it immoral to offer or to accept voluntary, non-sacrificial assistance. -- Ayn Rand
Freedom of association includes the freedom not to associate. -- Ayn Rand
Collectivism means the subjugation of the individual to a group - whether to a race, class or state does not matter. Collectivism holds that man must be chained to collective action and collective thought for the sake of what is called 'the common good' -- Ayn Rand
For the "We" must never be spoken, save by one's choice and as a second thought. This word must never be placed first within a man's soul, else it becomes a monster, the root of all evils on earth, the root of man's torture by men, and an unspeakable lie. -- Ayn Rand
He sat looking at her. She waited to see the derisive smile, but it did not come. The smile seemed implicit in the room itself, in her standing there, halfway across that room. -- Ayn Rand
John, the self-made man, self-made in every sense, out of nowhere, penniless, parentless, tie-less ... but I've always thought of him as if he had come into the world like Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, who sprang forth from Jupiter's head, fully grown and fully armed. -- Ayn Rand
Or did you say it's the love of money that's the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. -- Ayn Rand
Aren't you capable of a sublime gesture on occasion? They all work so hard and struggle and suffer, trying to achieve beauty, trying to surpass one another in beauty. Let's surpass them all! Let's throw their sweat in their face. Let's destroy them at one stroke. Let's be gods. Let's be ugly. -- Ayn Rand
Do it first and feel about it afterwards.' - Dagny Taggart -- Ayn Rand
When men reject reason, they have no means left for dealing with one another - except brute, physical force. -- Ayn Rand
She was looking at the unborn secret of the Buena Esperanza Pass, she knew that this was oil drawn out of shale by some method men had considered impossible. -- Ayn Rand
Nothing can justify injustice. -- Ayn Rand
Litigants obey the verdict of a tribunal solely on the premise that there is an objective rule of conduct, which they both accept. -- Ayn Rand
A man's rights are not violated by a private individual's refusal to deal with him. -- Ayn Rand
She watched the prairies the rivers, the towns slipping past at an untouchable distance below - and she noted that the sense of detachment one feels when looking at the earth from a plane was the same sense she felt when looking at people: only her distance from people seemed longer. - Dagny Taggart -- Ayn Rand
It was a day in March, and the sky was a faint green with the first hint of spring. In Central Park, five hundred feet below, the earth caught the tone of the sky in a shade of brown that promised to become green, and the lakes lay like splinters of glass under the cobwebs of bare branches. -- Ayn Rand
A rational man never distorts or corrupts his own standards and judgment in order to appeal to the irrationality, stupidity, or dishonesty of others. -- Ayn Rand
As we gain knowledge, we do not become more certain, we become certain of more. -- Ayn Rand
Aristotle may be regarded as the cultural barometer of Western history. Whenever his influence dominated the scene, it paved the way for one of history's brilliant eras; whenever it fell, so did mankind. -- Ayn Rand
He said it without greeting, as if they had parted the day before. Because it took her a moment to regain the art of breathing, she realized for the first time how much that voice meant to her. -- Ayn Rand
Collectivism requires self-sacrifice, the subordination of one's interests to those of others. -- Ayn Rand
Fransisco, you're some kind of very high nobility, aren't you?" He answered, "Not yet. The reason my family has lasted for such a long time is that none of us has ever been permitted to think he is born a d'Anconia. We are expected to become one. -- Ayn Rand
I don't want to see you. I don't like you. I don't like your face. You look like an insufferable egotist. You're impertinent. You're too sure of yourself. Twenty years ago I would have punched your face with the greatest of pleasure. -- Ayn Rand
We went on, cutting through the branches, and it was as if we were swimming through a sea of leaves, with the bushes as waves rising and falling and rising around us, and flinging their green sprays high to the treetops. -- Ayn Rand
To exist is to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of non-existence, it is to be an entity of a specific nature made of specific attributes. -- Ayn Rand
The quickest way to kill the human spirit is to ask someone to do mediocre work. -- Ayn Rand
They've done their best to make it harder for you, haven't they?" he said. -- Ayn Rand
Mr. Ward, what is it that the foulest bastards on earth denounce us for, among other things? Oh yes, for our motto of 'Business as usual.' Well-business as usual, Mr. Ward! -- Ayn Rand
There is no such thing as a lousy job - only lousy men who don't care to do it. -- Ayn Rand
Now I'll give you a choice. That train is going to be run. You have no choice about that. But you can choose whether it's going to be run by one of your men or not. If you choose not to let them, the train will still run, if I have to drive the engine myself. -- Ayn Rand
Parties are intended to be celebrations, and celebrations should be only for those who have something to celebrate. -- Ayn Rand
The dark, cluttered, polished mahogany splendor of the Sanborns' Victorian drawing room. Mr. Sanborn wavered. Roark asked, his arm sweeping out at the room around them: Is this -- Ayn Rand
Such would have been our life, had we not committed our crime which changed all things for us. And it was our curse which drove us to our crime. -- Ayn Rand
Toil, comrade," he said, "is the highest aim of our lives. Who does not toil, shall not eat." The book was filled. The official applied his rubber stamp to the last page. The stamp bore a globe overshadowed by a crossed sickle and hammer. -- Ayn Rand
Like a weighted diver sinking in an ocean
of mediocrity, under the pressure of men with
gelatin eyes, rubber voices, spiral-shaped
convictions, non-committal souls and non-committing
hands ... -- Ayn Rand
There is no such thing as "the right to enslave".A nation can do it , just as a man can become a criminal - but neither can do it by right.
It doesn't matter in this context, whether a nation was enslaved by force (like soviet Russia), or by vote (like Nazi Germany). -- Ayn Rand
Don't fool yourself, my dear. You're much worse than a bitch. You're a saint. Which shows why saints are dangerous and undesirable. -- Ayn Rand
Sex is the physical expression of a tribute to personal values. -- Ayn Rand
will, when he gets here. But, boy! - I'd work for him as a cinder sweeper. He'd blast through this valley like a rocket. He'd triple everybody's production." "Who's that?" "Hank Rearden. -- Ayn Rand
It stands to reason that if sacrifices are being given, somebody is collecting sacrifices. -- Ayn Rand
Because I never have any definite destination. This ship is not for going to places, but for getting away from them. When I stop at a port, it's only for the sheer pleasure of leaving it. I always think: here's one more place that can't hold me. -- Ayn Rand
Rights are not a matter of numbers - and there can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob. -- Ayn Rand
If men are to be ruled, then the enemy is reason. -- Ayn Rand
To hold an unchanging youth is to reach at the end, the vision with which one started. -- Ayn Rand
Alvah Scarret had never hated anything, and so was incapable of love. -- Ayn Rand
He thought that they were walking there like Mickey and Minnie Mouse and that they probably appeared ridiculous to the passers-by. -- Ayn Rand
A man can't get sick just because he oughta. -- Ayn Rand
The Romanticists did not present a hero as a statistical average, but as an abstraction of man's best and highest potentiality, applicable to and achievable by all men, in various degrees, according to their individual choices. -- Ayn Rand
If you agree with some tenets of Objectivism, but disagree with others, do not call yourself an Objectivist; give proper authorship credit for the parts you agree with -- Ayn Rand
A 'whim' is a desire experienced by a person who does not know and does not care to discover its cause. -- Ayn Rand
You are an unusual, brilliant child who has not seen enough of life to grasp the full measure of human stupidity. -- Ayn Rand
The age of the skyscraper is gone. This is the age of the housing project. Which is always a prelude to the age of the cave. -- Ayn Rand
Since reason is man's basic means of survival, that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; that which negates, opposes or destroys it is the evil. -- Ayn Rand
We have lied to ourselves. We have not built this box for the good of our brothers. We built it for its own sake. It is above all our brothers to us, and its truth above their truth. -- Ayn Rand
Namely, if I am challenging the base of all these institutions, I'm challenging the moral code of altruism. The precept that man's moral duty is to live for others. That man must sacrifice himself to others. Which is the present day morality. -- Ayn Rand
When all the decent pleasures are forbidden, there's always ways to get the rotten ones. You don't break into grocery stores after dark and you don't pick your fellow's pockets to buy classical symphonies or fishing tackle, but if it's to get stinking drunk and forget you do. -- Ayn Rand
To abstain from condemning a torturer, is to become an accessory to the torture and murder of his victims. -- Ayn Rand
The men of the press, who despised their own profession, did not know why they were enjoying it today. One of them, a young man with years of notorious success behind him and a cynical look of twice his age, said suddenly, 'I know what I'd like to be: I wish I could be a man who covers news!' -- Ayn Rand
He stepped to the window and pointed to the skyscrapers of the city. He said that we had to extinguish the lights of the world, and when we would see the lights of New York go out, we would know that our job was done. -- Ayn Rand
She stood in quiet excitement when the boat sailed back and she saw the city growing again to meet her. She stretched her arms wide. The city expanded, to her elbows, to her wrists, beyond her fingertips. Then the skyscrapers rose over her head, and she was back ...
Dominique. -- Ayn Rand
He demanded of all people the one thing he had never granted anybody: obedience. -- Ayn Rand
You don't care what others think - which might be understandable. But you don't care even to make them think as you do?"
"No."
"But that's ... that's monstrous."
"Is it? Probably. I couldn't say. -- Ayn Rand
A cardinal principle of good fiction [is]: the theme and the plot of a novel must be integrated - as thoroughly integrated as mind and body or thought and action in a rational view of man. -- Ayn Rand
What is the basic, the essential, the crucial principle that differentiates freedom from slavery? It is the principle of voluntary action versus physical coercion or compulsion. -- Ayn Rand
It is futile to fight against, if one does not know what one is fighting for. -- Ayn Rand
He walked with an effortless speed, feeling relaxed by a form of activity that was natural to him. -- Ayn Rand
The more propaganda ... conservatives spread for capitalist economics while at the same time preaching collectivism morally and philosophically , the more nails they'll drive into capitalism's coffin. -- Ayn Rand
That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call 'free will' is your mind's freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character. -- Ayn Rand
The secrets of this earth are not for all men to see, but only for those who will seek them (pg. 52). -- Ayn Rand
If you write a whole line of zeros,it's still nothing, (Kira Alexandrovna) -- Ayn Rand
A jagged object cut the sky above the roofs; it was half a spire, still holding the glow of the sunset; the gold leaf had long since peeled off the other half. The glow was red and still, like the reflection of a fire: not an active fire, but a dying one which it is too late to stop. -- Ayn Rand
I am interested in politics so that one day I will not have to be interested in politics. -- Ayn Rand
Mysticism requires the notion of the unknowable, which is revealed to some and withheld from others; this divides men into those who feel guilt and those who cash in on it. -- Ayn Rand
Roark spoke quietly. He was the only man in the room who felt certain of his own words. -- Ayn Rand
I think the only cardinal evil on earth is that of placing your primer concern within other men -- Ayn Rand
In the eyes of his contemporaries, he was a man who had committed the one unforgivable sin; he was proud of his wealth. -- Ayn Rand
But the man I met
he is the love I had wanted to reach long before I knew that he existed, and I think he will remain beyond my reach, but that I love him will be enough to keep me living. -- Ayn Rand
I could die for you. But I couldn't, and wouldn't, live for you. -- Ayn Rand
We knew not where we were going. We only knew that we must run, run to the end of the world, run to the end of our days. -- Ayn Rand
Any alleged "right" of one man, which necessitates the violation of the rights of another isn't and can't be a right. -- Ayn Rand
Dare not choose in your minds the work you would like to do when you leave the Home of the Students. You shall do what the Council of Vocations shall prescribe for you. -- Ayn Rand
The laws say that men may not write unless the Council of Vocations bid them so. -- Ayn Rand
He didn't want to be great, but to be thought great. -- Ayn Rand
The fields are black and ploughed, and they lie like a great fan before us, with their furrows gathered in some hand beyond the sky, spreading forth from that hand, opening wide apart as they come toward us, like black pleats that sparkle with thin, green spangles. -- Ayn Rand
...a very costly simplicity, one can notice, but not the elegance of a woman who gives much thought to her clothes; rather that of one who knows she can make any rag attractive and does it unconsciously."
Excerpt From: Ayn Rand. "Night of January 16th. -- Ayn Rand
You love only those who deserve it. -- Ayn Rand
His view of the world was simple: there were the able and there were the incompetent; he was not concerned with the latter. -- Ayn Rand
The naked shoulder was gown's only ornament -- Ayn Rand
A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. -- Ayn Rand
There's no way to make the irrational work. -- Ayn Rand
The virtue involved in helping those one loves is not 'selflessness' or 'sacrifice,' but integrity. -- Ayn Rand
The evasion of responsibility is the major cause of most peoples frustrations and defeats. -- Ayn Rand
It's because ... you see, if we had souls, which we haven't, and if our souls met
yours and mine
they'd fight to the death. But after they had torn each other to pieces, to the very bottom, they'd see that they had the same root. -- Ayn Rand
Anyone who wishes to be understood had better be sure he has made himself intelligible. -- Ayn Rand
Whoever claims the right to redistribute the wealth produced by others is claiming the right to treat human beings as chattel. -- Ayn Rand
Freedom (n.): To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing. -- Ayn Rand
If ever you hear a man telling you that you must be happy, that it's your natural right, that your first duty is to yourself - that will be the man who's not after your soul. -- Ayn Rand
Philosophically, Romanticism is a crusade to glorify man's existence; psychologically, it is experienced simply as the desire to make life interesting. -- Ayn Rand
Do you know that my personal crusade in life (in the philosophical sense) is not merely to fight collectivism, nor to fight altruism? These are only consequences, effects, not causes. I am out after the real cause, the real root of evil on earth the irrational. -- Ayn Rand
Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed. -- Ayn Rand
The difference between animals and humans is that animals change themselves for the environment, but humans change the environment for themselves. -- Ayn Rand
Kira, the highest thing in man is not his god. It's that in him which knows the reverence due a god. And you, Kira, are my highest reverence ... -- Ayn Rand
If men want to oppose war, it is statism that they must oppose. -- Ayn Rand
Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others. -- Ayn Rand
This god, this one word: I. -- Ayn Rand
Sometimes, she felt pity for those countless nameless ones somewhere around them who, in a feverish quest, were searching for some answer, and in their search crushed others, perhaps even her; but she could not be crushed, for she had the answer. -- Ayn Rand
Watching Larkin's efforts, Rearden felt what he did when he watched an ant struggling under the load of a matchstick. It's so hard for him, thought Rearden, and so easy for me. -- Ayn Rand
Did I feel a physical desire for him? I did. Was I moved by a passion of my body? I was. Have I experienced the most violent form of sensual pleasure? I have. -- Ayn Rand
The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see. -- Ayn Rand
Get the hell out of my way! Said by John Galt as the leaders of the country tried to make him become their dictator. -- Ayn Rand
Feeling quiet and empty, he told himself that he would be all right tomorrow. He would forgive himself the weakness of this night, it was like the tears one is permitted at a funeral, and then one learns how to live with an open wound or with a crippled factory. -- Ayn Rand
Even in dialogue, your own style rules your selection. Do not give yourself a blank check of this kind: 'I'll merely reproduce what I think a character like so-and-so would say.' You have to reproduce it in the way your literary premises dictate. -- Ayn Rand
A culture is made - or destroyed - by its articulate voices. -- Ayn Rand
If everybody were compelled to have the proper kind of education, we'd have a better world. If we force people to do good, they will be free to be happy. -- Ayn Rand
Your house is made by its own needs. Those others are made by the need to impress. The determining motive of your house is in the house. The determining motive of the other is in the audience. -- Ayn Rand
But Aristotle's philosophy was the intellect's Declaration of Independence. -- Ayn Rand
I can't compete and when I do, the rules of engagement change in the middle of the game. I'll let the powers that be vanquish themselves and return in three to five years to sift through the remains. -- Ayn Rand
The writer who develops a beautiful style, but has nothing to say, represents a kind of arrested esthetic development; he is like a pianist who acquires a brilliant technique by playing finger-exercises, but never gives a concert. -- Ayn Rand
Man's rights can be violated only by the use of physical force. It is only by means of physical force that one man can deprive another of his life, or enslave him, or rob him, or prevent him from pursuing his own goals, or compel him to act against his own rational judgment. -- Ayn Rand
Anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today. -- Ayn Rand
She stopped over the ledge where he worked and she stood watching him openly. When he raised his head, she did not turn away. Her glance told him that she knew the meaning of her action, but did not respect him enough to conceal it. His glance told her only that he had expected her to come. -- Ayn Rand
The air is pure under the ground. There is no odor of men. -- Ayn Rand
In a book of fiction the purpose is to create, for myself, the kind of world I want and to live in while I am creating it; then, as a secondary consequence, to let others enjoy this world, if, and to the extent that, they can. -- Ayn Rand
Courage and confidence are practical necessities, that courage is the practical form of being true to existence, of being true to truth, and confidence is the practical form of being true to one's own consciousness. -- Ayn Rand
Listen, here's something we can do: we can look at the moon, sometimes - and, you know, it's the same moon everywhere - and we would be looking at the same thing together that way, you see? -- Ayn Rand
Charity must be voluntary. -- Ayn Rand
Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human life. Whether you live or die is an absolute. Whether you have a piece of bread or not, is an absolute. Whether you eat your bread or see it vanish into a looter's stomach, is an absolute. -- Ayn Rand
She started off, walking fast, as if the speed of her steps could give form to the things she felt. -- Ayn Rand
It is a policeman's duty to retrieve stolen property and return it to its owners. But when robbery becomes the purpose of the law, and the policeman's duty becomes, not protection, but the plunder of property - then it is an outlaw who has to become a policeman. -- Ayn Rand
Wondering how one went about forcing one's mind into blankness, particularly after a lifetime lived on the axiom that the constant, clearest, most ruthless function of his rational faculty was his foremost duty. -- Ayn Rand
The leaves had edges of silver that trembled and rippled like a river of green and fire flowing high above us. -- Ayn Rand
The towns were like scattered puddles, left behind by a receding tide, still holding some precious drops of electricity, but drying out in a desert of rations, quotas, controls, and power-conservation rules. -- Ayn Rand
This was the great clarity of being beyond emotion, after the reward of having felt everything one could feel. -- Ayn Rand