Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Ayn Rand, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Ayn Rand quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 1496 Ayn Rand quotes for you to read and share.

Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000002455
The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000002592
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000002961
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000004007
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000004156
[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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000004165
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000005810
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000006135
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000007569
superiority as superiority" - automatically denied to those who asked for explanations. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000014742
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000015611
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000015672
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000016287
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000017474
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000017580
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000017728
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000019639
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000023824
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000025973
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000026453
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000027345
We are fornicating in the sight of six billion people. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000031612
I am not brave enough to be a coward," she said. "I see the consequences too clearly -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000032406
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000035687
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000036602
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000036831
Genius is an exaggeration of dimension. So is elephantiasis. Both may be only a disease. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000038942
He never felt lonliness except when he was happy. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000040114
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000040186
I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000040332
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000041669
I love doing it. Every building is like a person. Single and unrepeatable. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000043337
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000045021
He had a big head and a face so ugly it became almost fascinating. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000045633
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000045789
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000048251
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000050459
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000054608
A process of reason is a process of constant choice in answer to the question: True or False? - Right or Wrong? -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000054617
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000054625
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000054635
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000054641
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000054648
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000054649
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000055511
he was seeing the eyes of youth looking at the future with no uncertainty or fear. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000055804
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000056389
To what level of depravity has a society descended when it condemns a man simply because he is strong and great? -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000058348
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000061399
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000069314
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000074077
Throughout his life, whenever he became convinced that a course of action was right, the desire to follow it had come automatically. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000075861
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000082510
Ethics is a code of values which guide our choices and actions and determine the purpose and course of our lives. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000083291
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000085363
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000086185
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000086203
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000086854
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000087826
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000089454
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000090320
I will not die, it's the world that will end.
paraphrase of unknown philosopher -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000093594
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000094008
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000098835
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000103281
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000105645
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000106824
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000107130
And the desire would never be satisfied, except by a being of equal greatness. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000107702
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000108177
Your soul has a single basic function-the act of valuing. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000110901
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000110928
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000111291
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000114650
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000116061
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000117566
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000121019
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000121355
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000121431
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000123663
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000123726
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000124703
I used to call people, then I got into e-mailing, then texting, and now I just ignore everyone. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000126185
She looked slowly about her, noting every object and the reason for its presence. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000127785
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000128773
And suddenly that we were laughing out loud, laughing as if there were no power left in us save laughter. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000132101
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000133109
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000133369
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000135604
The ' pleasure' of being drunk is obviously the pleasure of escaping from the responsibility of Consciousness. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000140220
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000140488
What I described last," said Francisco, "is any man who proclaims his right to a single penny of another man's effort. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000143188
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000143845
Guilt is a rope that wears thin. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000145437
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000146847
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000148584
How do you always manage to decide?"
"How can you let others decide for you? -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000149596
It [ballet] projects a fragile kind of strength and a certain inflexible precision. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000152147
There was an expert competence in his manner of working; his movements were easy, intelligently economical. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000152778
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000154192
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000154278
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000155401
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000156189
It's so graceless, being a martyr. It's honoring your adversaries too much. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000156303
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000156857
One cannot deal with pure evil, with the naked, full-conscious evil that neither has nor seeks justification. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000157962
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000160478
Government holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000160533
She had been proved right so eloquently, she had thought, that comments were unnecessary. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000160963
The ladder of success is best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000164668
back, to feel the reality of his -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000168672
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000168880
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000172013
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000172033
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000172313
Anyone else would have taken a job in an -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000174524
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000175130
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000177973
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000180101
There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000181182
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000181308
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000181897
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000182303
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000183887
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000185916
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000185989
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000187868
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000188012
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000188156
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000192004
Here, we trade achievements, not failures - values, not needs. We're free of one another, yet we all grow together. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000192219
Don't set out to raze all shrines, you'll frighten men. enshrine mediocrity-and the shrines are razed. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000192992
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000194083
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000197272
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000197623
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000197691
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000202464
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000203586
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000205787
An irrational society is a society of moral cowards-
of men paralyzed by the loss of moral standards , principles, and goals -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000205802
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000205820
There can be no compromise on moral principles. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000205833
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000205840
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000205853
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000207173
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000207195
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000207637
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000208986
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000211667
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000212332
A man's ego is the fountainhead of human progress. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000218797
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000219511
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000222266
The effort he demanded of his employees was hard to perform; the effort of himself was hard to believe. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000224552
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000225153
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000230877
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000232868
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000234760
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000235585
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000235939
She sat looking at him as she always did; her glance had tenderness without scorn and sadness without pity. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000236947
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000237662
The end does not justify the means. No one's rights can be secured by the violation of the rights of others. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000238000
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000238077
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000239040
The only thing that can make a man do something he doesn't like is guilt -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000239793
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000239939
Sacrifice is the surrender of that which you value in favor of which you dont -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000242214
Don't worry. They're all against me. But I have one advantage: they don't know what they want. I do. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000242395
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000242836
The Council of Schools has said that there are no mysteries. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000249936
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000250719
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000250862
Capitalism is based on individual rights - not on the sacrifice of the individual to the 'public good' of the collective. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000250863
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000252769
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000257805
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000258595
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000258598
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000259663
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000260265
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000260273
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000260389
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000260528
A man who surrenders his value is at mercy of anyone's will. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000260733
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000263112
My hands ... My spirit ... My sky ... My forest ... This earth of mine ... -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000263516
whatever we are, it's we who move the world and it's we who'll pull it through. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000265167
Men differ in their virtues, if any," said Gail Wynand, explaining his policy, "but they are alike in their vices. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000266318
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000267628
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000268106
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000270044
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000270356
Integrity does not consist of loyalty to ones subjective whims, but of loyalty to rational principles -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000271832
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000275296
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000275427
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000276192
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000277664
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000278868
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000279848
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000281851
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000285897
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000287278
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000288620
I want to be prepared to claim the greatest virtue of all - that I was a man who made money -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000291793
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000294873
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000296298
It was the greatest sensation of existence: not to trust but to know. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000303361
In order to fight any issue, it is necessary to fight for something, not merely against something. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000303423
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000304491
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000305350
Seeking God - and finding itself. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000305686
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000309049
No group has any proper intellectual leadership today or any proper representation. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000309349
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000310799
And love is exception-making. If you were in love you'd want to be broken, trampled, ordered, dominated, -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000311470
The sight of an achievement was the greatest gift a human being could offer to others. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000312714
We are those who do not disconnect the values of their minds from the actions of their bodies. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000318047
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000319857
A free mind and a free economy are corollaries. One can't exist without the other. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000319862
Faith and force ... are corollaries: every period of history dominated by mysticism, was a period of statism, of dictatorship, of tyranny. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000319867
Political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000320668
Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to? -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000323674
An architect requires a great many men to erect his building. But he does not ask them to vote on his design. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000326029
Humanity's darkest evil, the most destructive horror machine among all the devices of men, is non-objective law.. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000328377
If parasitism, favoritism, corruption, and greed for the unearned did not exist, a mixed economy would bring them into existence. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000329173
The most beautiful words were those which were not needed. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000329233
We have come to see how great is the unexplored. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000331227
Identify the dominant philosophy of a society and you can predict its future. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000333325
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000335141
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000339842
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000343736
There is no necessity for pain-why, then, is the worst pain reserved for those who will not accept its necessity? -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000344571
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000345723
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000349587
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000349906
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000351440
If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000352708
If a businessman makes a mistake, he suffers the consequences. If a bureaucrat makes a mistake, you suffer the consequences. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000355535
If one's actions are honest, one does not need the predated confidence of others. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000356053
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000361146
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000362391
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000364057
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000365001
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000367911
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000368780
I'm so hungry for any sight of anyone who's able to do whatever it is he's doing! -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000368883
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000369813
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000371323
Whoever defends his own rights defends the rights of all. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000373080
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000373525
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000374307
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000374368
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000375441
Let me by the child in that story and declare that the Emperor is naked-or that America is culturally bankrupt. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000376217
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000376226
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000377146
It is morally obscene to regard wealth as an anonymous, tribal product and to talk about 'redistributing' it. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000380404
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000381516
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000381758
[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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000382438
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000382500
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000382646
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000383116
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000383131
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000383897
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000384366
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000391134
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000391473
It [ballet] is a perfect medium for the expression of spiritual love. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000392489
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000392546
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000393519
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000395075
You have been paying blackmail, not for your vices, but for your virtues. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000397578
It had been said that men develop brains when they have failed in everything else. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000399457
Ideas are the greatest and most crucially practical power on earth. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000401094
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000401857
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000401993
Nature is not to be conquered, man is. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000402626
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000407096
Professional intellectuals are the voice of a culture and are, therefore, its leaders, its integrators and its bodyguards. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000408260
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000411856
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000411898
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000413468
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000414847
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000418078
Face a challenge and find joy in the capacity to meet it. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000418416
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000418500
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000424478
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000426877
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000427784
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000428763
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000429174
We didn't really have to take everything so seriously, did we? -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000432301
To me there's only one form of human depravity-the man without a purpose. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000434672
(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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000437152
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000437535
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000438209
But you see, the measure of hell you're able to endure is the measure of your love. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000438974
Let us destroy, but don't let us pretend that we are commiting an act of virtue. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000440145
A wall of the most effective soundproofing: indifference. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000440382
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000441103
At a time like this, we can't afford the luxury of thinking! -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000443118
Logic rests on the axiom that existence exists. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000444467
It is not as late as you think. It is merely early - in the age of the rebirth of individualism. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000445207
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000446879
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000448009
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000450150
I am not looking for intelligent disagreement any longer ... What I am looking for is intelligent agreement. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000451120
An emotion as much tells you nothing about reality, beyond the fact that something makes you feel something. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000452379
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000454204
She had always been ... the motive power of her own happiness. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000454320
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000454430
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000457752
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000465621
So long as road lies before us, and what care we if we must travel it alone! -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000466198
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000471376
Rationalization is a process of not perceiving reality, but of attempting to make reality fit one's emotions. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000472420
There is only one source of authentic self-confidence: reason. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000472743
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000473167
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000476901
My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists - and in a single choice: to live. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000480802
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000481390
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000482356
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000483797
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000485632
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000487942
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000489706
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000491649
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000494156
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000494266
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000494334
What are you laughing at?"
"It's wonderful."
"What?"
"The way you don't react as everybody else does nowadays. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000494509
One does not bargain over inches of evil. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000495544
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000497156
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000498840
Who pays for the orgy? -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000499288
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000501259
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000501810
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000502855
Defiance, not obedience, is the American's answer to overbearing authority. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000504143
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000505232
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000508886
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000511259
I am the man who loves his life. I am the man who does not sacrifice his love or his values. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000513211
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000513720
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000513775
But neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000515989
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000516787
Sacrifice does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000518735
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000519881
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000520531
Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000525435
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000525782
No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the sum of his knowledge. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000526977
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000526981
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000529461
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000529682
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000529774
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000529874
And now, sitting here in our tunnel, we wonder about these words. It is forbidden, not to be happy. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000530703
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000531889
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000532302
That doesn't matter. Not even that they'll destroy it. Only that it had existed." She -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000534656
She had always looked for sparks of competence, like a diamond prospector in an unpromising wasteland. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000534777
The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000537589
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000542590
She had caught the sound of suffering in the faintest exaggeration of evenness in his voice. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000544012
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000546389
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000546770
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000549189
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000551948
The sacred word: EGO -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000554821
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000555842
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000555846
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000555852
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000561002
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000561397
Style is not an end in itself, it is only a means to an end - the means of telling a story. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000561709
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000561887
She drove fast, as a matter of habit, an even speed without a sense of haste. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000562138
It is not fools that I seek to address. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000562779
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000566504
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000566635
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000568071
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000568076
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000568078
moral absolute one does not -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000568080
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000568082
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000570139
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000571719
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000571781
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000574204
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000575786
No man can predict the time when others will choose to return to reason. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000576968
They had counted on his pity and dreaded his anger; they had not dared consider the third alternative: his indifference. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000578420
Don't ever get angry at a man for stating the truth.
Dagny Taggart -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000579028
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000580858
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000581727
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000582062
I want to drink. I want a woman like you. I want to go down, as far as you can drag me. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000586790
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000588936
Do not help your jailers to pretend that their jail is your natural state of existence. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000594453
She thought how strange it would be if she ever said 'Hello' to him. One did not greet oneself each morning. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000596468
Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000596469
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000596479
The essential characteristic of socialism is the denial of individual property rights ... -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000596483
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000596512
Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000596513
America's founding Ideal was the principle of individual rights. Nothing more - and nothing less. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000598311
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000600158
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000601152
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000601277
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000602326
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000602452
The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000606054
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000610383
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000610443
To achieve, you need thought -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000612056
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000612088
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000613329
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000617501
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000617504
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000617514
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000617517
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000617518
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000617539
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000617733
Freedom of association includes the freedom not to associate. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000618033
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000618197
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000619075
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000622541
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000624705
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000627113
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000627253
Do it first and feel about it afterwards.' - Dagny Taggart -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000628861
When men reject reason, they have no means left for dealing with one another - except brute, physical force. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000630315
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000630777
Nothing can justify injustice. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000631356
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000631663
A man's rights are not violated by a private individual's refusal to deal with him. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000632549
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000633650
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000634296
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000636086
As we gain knowledge, we do not become more certain, we become certain of more. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000636253
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000637779
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000639780
Collectivism requires self-sacrifice, the subordination of one's interests to those of others. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000642040
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000645921
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000646160
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000648215
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000649547
The quickest way to kill the human spirit is to ask someone to do mediocre work. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000649737
They've done their best to make it harder for you, haven't they?" he said. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000651156
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000651187
There is no such thing as a lousy job - only lousy men who don't care to do it. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000651453
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000651600
Parties are intended to be celebrations, and celebrations should be only for those who have something to celebrate. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000651613
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000653689
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000654838
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000655239
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000656755
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000657035
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000659134
Sex is the physical expression of a tribute to personal values. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000659325
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000663159
It stands to reason that if sacrifices are being given, somebody is collecting sacrifices. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000665076
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000665209
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000667656
If men are to be ruled, then the enemy is reason. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000673616
To hold an unchanging youth is to reach at the end, the vision with which one started. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000675058
Alvah Scarret had never hated anything, and so was incapable of love. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000675411
He thought that they were walking there like Mickey and Minnie Mouse and that they probably appeared ridiculous to the passers-by. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000679685
A man can't get sick just because he oughta. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000682769
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000684643
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000684933
A 'whim' is a desire experienced by a person who does not know and does not care to discover its cause. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000686985
You are an unusual, brilliant child who has not seen enough of life to grasp the full measure of human stupidity. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000687459
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000688130
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000689995
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000692292
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000695639
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000699831
To abstain from condemning a torturer, is to become an accessory to the torture and murder of his victims. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000699851
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000702368
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000702392
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000702590
He demanded of all people the one thing he had never granted anybody: obedience. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000703062
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000703250
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000705710
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000707099
It is futile to fight against, if one does not know what one is fighting for. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000708529
He walked with an effortless speed, feeling relaxed by a form of activity that was natural to him. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000710287
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000711405
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000713200
The secrets of this earth are not for all men to see, but only for those who will seek them (pg. 52). -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000714961
If you write a whole line of zeros,it's still nothing, (Kira Alexandrovna) -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000716492
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000718039
I am interested in politics so that one day I will not have to be interested in politics. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000719709
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000723867
Roark spoke quietly. He was the only man in the room who felt certain of his own words. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000724713
I think the only cardinal evil on earth is that of placing your primer concern within other men -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000724945
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000725982
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000726647
I could die for you. But I couldn't, and wouldn't, live for you. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000727141
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000728020
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000728384
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000728396
The laws say that men may not write unless the Council of Vocations bid them so. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000728531
He didn't want to be great, but to be thought great. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000730386
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000731434
...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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000733125
You love only those who deserve it. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000735191
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000736598
The naked shoulder was gown's only ornament -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000737097
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000739701
There's no way to make the irrational work. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000741254
The virtue involved in helping those one loves is not 'selflessness' or 'sacrifice,' but integrity. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000743919
The evasion of responsibility is the major cause of most peoples frustrations and defeats. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000745651
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000748325
Anyone who wishes to be understood had better be sure he has made himself intelligible. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000748411
Whoever claims the right to redistribute the wealth produced by others is claiming the right to treat human beings as chattel. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000748993
Freedom (n.): To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000749713
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000750131
Philosophically, Romanticism is a crusade to glorify man's existence; psychologically, it is experienced simply as the desire to make life interesting. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000750144
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000751150
Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000751746
The difference between animals and humans is that animals change themselves for the environment, but humans change the environment for themselves. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000752860
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000753149
If men want to oppose war, it is statism that they must oppose. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000754710
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000755692
This god, this one word: I. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000755772
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000756019
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000756713
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000758588
The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000758866
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000760603
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000760746
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000762848
A culture is made - or destroyed - by its articulate voices. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000764962
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000765140
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000767191
But Aristotle's philosophy was the intellect's Declaration of Independence. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000767471
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000770085
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000772060
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000772235
Anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000774202
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000776509
The air is pure under the ground. There is no odor of men. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000776812
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000777958
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000778533
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000779195
Charity must be voluntary. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000781697
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000782853
She started off, walking fast, as if the speed of her steps could give form to the things she felt. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000783311
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000783426
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000783856
The leaves had edges of silver that trembled and rippled like a river of green and fire flowing high above us. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000786117
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
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000788432
This was the great clarity of being beyond emotion, after the reward of having felt everything one could feel. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000788554
Keating felt naked ... People were his protection against people. Roark had no sense of people. Others gave Keating a feeling of his own value. Roark gave him nothing. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000789279
You are so lost to your higher self that you would resent me for my achievements, rather than celebrate them with me, sexually? -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000789787
Civilization does not have to perish. The brutes are winning only by default. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000792215
The conservatives want to rule man's consciousness; the liberals, his body. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000792962
Reality confronts man with a great many musts, but all of them are conditional the formula of realistic necessity is You must, if and the if stands for man's choice -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000795021
I consider promiscuity immoral. Not because sex is evil, but because sex is too good and too important ... -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000795166
An emotion is an automatic response, an automatic effect of man's value premises. An effect, not a cause. There is no necessary clash, no dichotomy between man's reason and his emotions -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000796543
Rearden sat in his room at the Wayne-Falkland Hotel, fighting an enemy more dangerous than weariness or fear: revulsion against the thought of having to deal with human beings. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000797323
It is the metaphysically given that must be accepted: it cannot be changed. It is the man-made that must never be accepted uncritically: it must be judged, then accepted or rejected and changed when necessary. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000797339
I want to know that I've accomplished something. I want to feel that it had some meaning. At the last summing up, I want to be sure it wasn't all-for nothing. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000798031
There are no evil thoughts except one; the refusal to think. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000799071
Never ask people. Not about your work. Don't you know what you want? How can you stand it, not to know? -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000799654
If you intend to keep your word, don't talk about it, just do it. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000800260
If the rest of them can survive only by destroying us, then why should we wish them to survive? ... Nothing can make it moral to destroy the best. One can't be punished for being good. One can't be penalized for ability. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000801263
We will not deal with men on any terms but ours - and our terms are a moral code which holds that man is an end in himself and not the means to any end of others. We do not seek to force our code upon them. They are free to believe what they please. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000804700
If a ray of light falls into a pigsty, it is the ray that shows us the muck and it is the ray that is offensive. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000804720
She never knew where he was, in what city or on what continent, the day after she had seen him. He always came to her unexpectedly - and she liked it, because it made him a continuous presence in her life, like the ray of a hidden light that could hit her at any moment. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000805764
Compromise does not satisfy, but dissatisfies everybody; it does not lead to any general fulfillment, but to general frustration; those who try to become everything to all people end up by not being anything to anyone. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000806390
You give them what they profess to like in public. I give them what they really like. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000807278
You can't have your cake and let your neighbour eat it too. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000807478
But, you see, it's not what you do that matters really. It's only you."
"Me what?"
"Just you here. Or you in the city. Or you somewhere in the world. I don't know. Just that. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000808590
My life is the highest of values, too high to give up without a fight. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000809945
Honor is self-esteem made visible in action. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000810131
I just there for two days and that thought of what last words I could say to the firing squad. As good a pastime as any. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000811474
There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000812032
I want it real. I want to know that there is someone, somewhere, who wants it, too. Or else what is the use of seeing it, and working, and burning oneself for an impossible vision? A spirit, too, needs fuel. It can run dry -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000813055
The difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is a matter of time. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000814788
A man who seeks escape from the responsibility of supporting his life by his own thought and effort, and wishes to survive by conquering, ruling and exploiting others, is NOT an Individualist. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000817517
It is a sin to write this. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000817785
I refuse to apologize for my ability - I refuse to apologize for my success - I refuse to apologize for my money. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000817791
I like to deal with somebody who has no illusions about getting favors. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000817806
When you violate the rights of one man, you have violated the rights of all, and a public of rightless creatures is doomed to destruction. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000817917
HOWARD ROARK LAUGHED. He stood naked at the edge of a cliff. The lake lay far below him. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000819635
The man without a purpose is a man who drifts at the mercy of random feelings or unidentified urges and is capable of any evil, because he is totally out of control of his own life. In order to be in control of your life, you have to have a purpose-a productive purpose. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000819825
Today we have discovered the word that could not be said. I -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000822845
And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride. This god, this one word: 'I. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000823862
There are only two means by which men can deal with one another: guns or logic. Force or persuasion. Those who know that they cannot win by means of logic, have always resorted to guns. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000825696
You're the most immoral man living - you think of nothing but justice! -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000825751
If any part of your uncertainty is a conflict between your heart and your mind - follow your mind. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000826383
His face was like a law of nature - a thing one could not question, alter or implore. It had high cheekbones over gaunt, hollow cheeks; gray eyes, cold and steady; a contemptuous mouth, shut tight, the mouth of an executioner or a saint. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000828514
His smile had an attractive quality, the smile of a man of the world who used it, not to cover his words, but to stress the audacity of expressing a sincere emotion. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000828839
My pride and my power of vision were all that I owned when I started - and whatever I achieved, was achieved by means of them. Both are greater now. Now I have the knowledge of the superlative value I had missed: of my right to be proud of my vision. The rest is mine to reach. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000830144
The giants of the intellect, whom you admire so much, once taught you that the earth was flat and that the atom was the smallest particle of matter. The entire history of science is a progression of exploded fallacies, not of achievements. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000830331
She did not smile, but her face had the lovely serenity that can become a smile without transition. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000832796
He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000837005
Nobody has ever given a reason why men should be their brother's keepers. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000838555
To know one's own desires, their meaning and their costs requires the highest human virtue: rationality. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000839182
You don't know how hard I've tried to be left standing all by myself. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000840636
I worship individuals for their highest possibilities as individuals and I loathe humanity for its failure to live up to these possibilities. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000841999
Don't ever give up what you want in life. The struggle is worth it. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000842278
He did not know that he was expected to attempt to buy his way into society and that they anticipated the pleasure of rejecting him. He had no time to notice their disappointment. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000846413
Rulers exist entirely through the persons of others. Their goal is in their subjects, in the activity of enslaving. They are as dependent as the beggar, the social worker and the bandit. The form of dependence does not matter. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000849383
It's a rare gift, you know, to feel reverence for your own life and to want the best, the greatest, the highest possible, here, now, for your very own. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000851606
To say "I love you" one must know first how to say the "I". -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000852831
They used to rush through here, and it was wonderful to watch, it was the hurry of men who knew where they were going and were eager to get there. Now they're hurrying because they are afraid. It's not a purpose that drives them, it's fear. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000854619
Faith is the wors curse of mankind, as the exact antithesis and enemy of thought. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000854768
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, like a journey ... -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000854786
If you tell an ugly woman that she is beautiful, you offer her the great homage of corrupting the concept of beauty. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000855339
The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000857027
Every honest man lives for himself. Every man worth calling a man lives for himself. The one who doesn't - doesn't live at all. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000858971
But I don't think of you. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000859532
The worst wars are religious wars between sects of the same religion or civil wars between brothers of the same race. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000859809
She could not descend to an existence where her brain would explode under the pressure of forcing itself not to outdistance incompetence. She could not function to the rule of: Pipe down-keep down-slow down-don't do your best, it is not wanted! -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000863776
You have been the one encounter in my life that can never be repeated -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000864672
I would step in the way of a bullet if it were aimed at my husband. It is not self-sacrifice to die protecting that which you value: If the value is great enough, you do not care to exist without it. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000865482
She wanted to tell him of the years she had spent looking for men such as he to work with; she wanted to tell him that his enemies were hers, that she was fighting the same battle ... -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000867334
What greater wealth is there than to own your life and to spend it on growing? Every living thing must grow. It can't stand still. It must grow or perish. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000869726
There is fear hanging in the air of the sleeping halls, and the air of the streets. Fear walks through the city, fear without name, without shape. All men feel it and none dare speak. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000870494
Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000871458
You never wanted me to be real. You never wanted anyone to be. But you didn't want me to show it. You wanted an act to help your act ... -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000876562
It's very uncomfortable to be a hero, Joel, and you don't have the figure for it. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000877118
His motive in the relationship seemed to resemble the need of an anemic person who receives a kind of living transfusion from the mere sight of a savagely overabundant vitality. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000878902
It was the smile of a man who is able to see, to know and to create the glory of existence. It was the mocking, challenging smile of a brilliant intelligence. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000879831
He led her to the bedroom, he took off her clothes, without a word, in the manner of an owner undressing a person whose consent is not required. He clasped the pendant on her shoulders. She stood naked, the stone between her breasts, like a sparkling drop of blood. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000879993
Learn to value yourself, which means: fight for your happiness. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000880970
What is kinder
to believe the best of people and burden them with a nobility beyond their endurance
or to see them as they are, and accept it because it makes them comfortable? -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000881954
If a society is to be free, its government has to be controlled. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000881995
This is a great sin, to be born with a head which is too quick. It is not good to be different from our brothers, but it is evil to be superior to them. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000882064
I am opposed to all forms of control. I am for an absolute, laissez-faire, free, unregulated economy. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000886046
Living in a society, instead of on a desert island, does not relieve a man of the responsibility of supporting his own life. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000886914
Happiness is self-contained and self-sufficient. Happy men have no time and no use for you. Happy men are free men. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000887404
You're so beautiful, Dominique. Its such a lovely accident on God's part that there's one person who matches inside and out. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000887405
If lightning strikes a rotten tree and it collapses, it's not the fault of the lightning. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000887406
No happy person can be quite so impervious to pain (Gail Wynand to Dominique Francon) -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000887408
He telephoned half an hour ago. Mr. Gail Wynand. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000887409
He seemed as graciously at home as in the best restaurants of the city; his elegance had an odd quality here - it did not insult the place, but seemed to transform it, like the presence of a king who never alters his manner, yet makes a palace of any house he enters. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000887410
Wynand asked: "Howard, have you ever been in love?" Roark turned to look straight at him and answer quietly: "I still am." "But when you walk through a building, what you feel is greater than that?" "Much greater, Gail. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000887411
"You were not born to be a second-hander." Howard Roark to Gail Wynand in "The Fountainhead" -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000887435
Freedom, in a political context, means freedom from government coercion. It does not mean freedom from the landlord, from the employer, or freedom from the laws of nature which do not provide men with automatic prosperity. It means freedom from the coercive power of the state ' and nothing else -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000889022
When you have civilized men fighting savages, you support the civilized men, no matter who they are. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000891739
No. Forget it. You're only fooling yourself." "About what?" "About anything being worth a damn. It's dust, lady, all of it, dust and blood. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000893390
I refuse to accept as guilt the fact of my own existence. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000893439
Whenever anyone accuses some person of being 'unfeeling,' he means that that person is just. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000893760
If his judgment is to be an object of sacrifice - what sort of efficacy, control, freedom from conflict, or serenity of spirit will be possible to man? -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000894536
Abortion is a moral right - which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000897704
The sky is a soggy purple. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000897725
No battle was hard, no decision was dangerous where there was no soggy uncertainty, no shapeless evasion to encounter. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000897848
Politically, the goal of today's dominant trend
is statism.
Philosophically, the goal is the
obliteration of reason;
psychologically, it is the
erosion of ambition. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000898506
One must differentiate between one's thoughts and one's emotions with full clarity and precision ... No discussion, cooperation, agreement, or understanding is possible among men who substitute emotion for proof. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000898892
Man who rules the mob only as long as he says what the mob wants him to say. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000900166
She wondered why she had never noticed that she did not know his name and why she had never asked him. Perhaps because she had known everything she had to know about him from that first glance. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000901332
It's because it makes no difference to her at all whether I speak or not; as if I didn't exist and never had existed ... the thing more inconceivable than one's death
never to have been born ... -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000902562
It is so commonplace," she drawled, "to be understood by everybody. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000903225
- what do I need philosophy for? My answer is: In order to be able to deal with concrete, particular, real-life problems - i.e., in order to be able to live on earth. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000903553
No one's happiness but my own is in my power to achieve or to destroy. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000904975
There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism - by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000908091
Didn't you enjoy meeting the young men?"
"What men? There wasn't a man there I couldn't squash ten of. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000912212
somehow, he had never taken advantage of it. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000915677
If some men are entitled by right to the products of the work of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labor. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000916528
What kind of a tragedy did you have in your childhood?"
"Why, none at all. I had a wonderful childhood. Free and peaceful and not bothered too much by anybody. Well, yes, I did feel bored very often. But I'm used to that. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000919341
Guilt is altruism's stock in trade, and the inducing of guilt is its only means of self-perpetuati on. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000922830
Do you mean to tell me that you're thinking seriously of building that way, when and if you are an architect?"
"Yes."
"My dear fellow, who will let you?"
"That's not the point. The point is, who will stop me? -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000923559
They want us to pretend that we see the world as they pretend they see it. They need some sort of sanction from us. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000924095
His face gave her nothing in answer: it had that look of respectful severity with which a man stands before the fact that the truth is the truth. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000926960
Incredulity and indifference were her only reaction: incredulity, because she could not conceive of what would bring human beings to such a state - indifference, because she could not regard those who reached it, as human any longer. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000927175
He said, looking down at her body, "Dagny, what a magnificent waste!"
She had to turn and escape. She felt herself blushing, for the first time in years: blushing because she knew suddenly that the sentence named what she had felt all evening. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000928164
Don't rely on our knowledge of what's best for your future. We do know, but it can't be best until you know it. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000930819
I'll listen if you want me to ... But I think I should tell you now that nothing you can say will make any difference. If you don't mind that, I don't mind listening. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000933288
Well, I always know what I want. And when you know what you want
you go toward it. Sometimes you go very fast, and sometimes only an inch a year. Perhaps you feel happier when you go fast. I don't know. I've forgotten the difference long ago, because it really doesn't matter, so long as you move. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000933454
Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000935296
It is only in the realm of pure science that truth is an absolute criterion. When we deal with applied science, with technology - we deal with people. And when we deal with people, considerations other than truth enter the question. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000937348
A man's spirit is his self. That entity which is his consciousness. To think, to feel, to judge, to act are functions of the ego. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000937426
A thing is not high if one can reach it; it is not great if one can reason it; it is not deep if one can see its bottom. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000939623
When a man drowns himself in work, it's because he's trying to escape from something. You ought to have a hobby. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000942726
To settle down into a job that requires less than your mind's full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay - that -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000944987
People want nothing but mirrors around them. To reflect them while they're reflecting too ... Reflections of reflections and echoes of echoes. No beginning and no end. No center and no purpose. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000945040
You know, I think that only if one feels immensely important can one feel truly light. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000945636
You're not even boasting about it."
"Should I?"
"You can't. You're too arrogant to boast. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000945638
He was usually disliked, from the first sight of his face, anywhere he went. His face was closed like the door of a safety vault; things locked in safety vaults are valuable; men did not care to feel that. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000945639
The great creators-the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors-stood alone against the men of their time. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000945641
When one makes enemies one knows that one's dangerous where it's necessary to be dangerous. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000945642
The best is a matter of standards - and I set my own standards. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000945643
They talked about nothing in particular, sentences that had meaning only in the sound of the voices, in warm gaiety, in the ease of complete relaxation. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000945644
For people who enjoyed their own presence well enough and sought only a place where they would be left free to enjoy it. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000945645
He thought ... that man's work should be a higher step, an improvement on nature, not a degradation. He did not want to despise men; he wanted to love and admire them. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000945646
I want to sleep with you. Now, tonight, and at any time you may care to call me. I want your naked body, your skin. your mouth, your hands ... - I want you like an animal ... or a whore. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000945647
She wondered why her normal desire to say little, to hold things closed, broke down before him, why she felt compelled to simple frankness, such as she could offer no one else. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000945648
Roark stood before them as each man stands in the innocence of his own mind. But Roark stood like that before a hostile crowd - and they knew suddenly that no hatred was possible to him. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000945649
She walked down the hill and she found relief in the unnatural stillness of the earth around her, the stillness of full light without sun, of leaves without motion, of a luminous, waiting silence. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000945650
I do not recognize anyone's right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000945652
He does not achieve through other men nor for other men, he achieves through and for himself alone, then offers it to others. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000945654
What you feel in the presence of a thing you admire is just one word - 'Yes.' The affirmation, the acceptance, the sign of admittance. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000945655
...Opinion without a rational process. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000945656
The unrecognized genius - that's an old story. Have you ever thought of a much worse one - the genius recognized too well? ... That a great many men are poor fools who can't see the best - that's nothing. One can't get angry at that. But do you understand about the men who see it and don't want it? -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000945658
There had always been a God and a Devil - only men had been so mistaken about the shapes of their Devil - he was not single and big, he was many and smutty and small. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000945660
And, after all, you've got to live."
"Not that way," said Roark. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000945661
My real soul ... ? It's real only when it's independent ... -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000945662
Dominique, it's abnormal to feel so strongly about anything." "That's the only way I can feel. Or not at all. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000945663
She had nothing to hide from him, nothing to keep unstated, everything was granted, answered, found. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000945664
I have yet to see a genius or a hero who, if stuck with a burning match, would feel less pain than his undistinguished average brother. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000945665
The indignation was too sharp and raw for a mere piece of professional gossip; each man took it as a personal insult; each felt himself qualified to alter, advise and improve the work of any man living. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000945666
Great men can't be ruled ... The great is the rare, the difficult, the exceptional. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000945667
It was not a silence of resentment; it was the silence of an understanding too delicate to limit by words. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000945671
You're the most egotistical and the kindest man I know. And that doesn't make sense."
"Maybe the concepts don't make sense. Maybe they don't mean what people have been taught to think they mean. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000945672
I recognize no obligations toward men except one: to respect their freedom and to take no part in a slave society. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000945674
The crowd would have forgiven anything, except a man who could remain normal under the vibrations of its enormous collective sneer. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000945676
I can do nothing halfway. Those who can, have a fissure somewhere inside. Most people have many. They lie to themselves - not to know that. I've never lied to myself. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000945677
Her face looked as if she knew his worst suffering and it was hers and she wished to bear it like this, coldly, asking no words of mitigation. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000945678
I don't like people who try to say only what they think I think. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000945680
She did not mind this new background; she was indifferent to the slums as she had been indifferent to the drawing rooms. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000945681
It's a law of survival, isn't it? - to seek the best. I didn't come for your sake. I came for mine. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000947069
Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000950417
I am. I think. I will. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000956264
The government was set to protect man from criminals, and the Constitution was written to protect man from the government. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000959640
cardboard on the tips of his ten fingers, up the crimson-plushed stairway to Guy Francon's office. The cardboard displayed a water-color perspective of a gray granite -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000960117
The most depraved type of human being ... (is) the man without a purpose. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000960128
Francisco, what's the most depraved type of human being?" "The man without a purpose. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000960402
I love you so much that nothing can matter to me - not even you ... Only my love- not your answer. Not even your indifference -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000961401
She sat beside him in the car, feeling no desire to speak, knowing that neither of them could conceal the meaning of their silence. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000962763
Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's value. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000965827
Sexual love, Peter, is a profoundly selfish emotion. And selfish emotions are not the ones that lead to happiness. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000966810
Let us throw away our candles and our torches. Let us flood the cities with light. Let us bring a new light to men!
-Equality 7-2521 -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000967527
From the first extortion he had accepted, from the first directive he had obeyed, he had given them cause to believe that reality was a thing to be cheated, that one could demand the irrational and someone somehow would provide it. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000969081
Tell me what a person finds sexually attractive and I will tell you their entire philosophy of life. Show me the person they sleep with and I will tell you their valuation of themselves. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000969304
Never think of pain or danger or enemies a moment longer than is necessary to fight them. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000969769
To preserve one's mind intact through a modern college education is a test of courage and endurance, but the battle is worth it and the stakes are the highest possible to man: the survival of reason. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000969781
But why should you care what people will say? All you have to do is please yourself. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000971818
All work is an act of philosophy. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000973051
There is only one path to heaven. On Earth we call it Love. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000978063
It is a sin to think words no others think -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000978084
Since when did you take to abstract philosophy? You're only a businessman, you're not qualified to deal with questions of principle, you ought to leave it to the experts -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000981956
The basic cause of totalitarianism is two ideas: men's rejection of reason in favor of faith, and of self-interest in favor of self-sacrifice. If -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000985588
The vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your existence. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000986172
Other people are human. They're sensitive. They can't devote their whole life to metals and engines. You're lucky- you've never had any feelings. You've never felt anything at all. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000987149
The entire history of science is a progression of exploded fallacies. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000987767
He saw, on their faces, that stubbornly evasive look ... the look of a man cheating himself of his own consciousness. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000990287
I agree that [marriage] should be treated like a business deal. But every business deal has to have its own terms and its own kind of currency. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000996711
When I listen to a symphony I love, I don't get from it what the composer got. His 'Yes' was different from mine. He could have no concern for mine and no exact conception of it. That answer is too personal to each man. But in giving himself what he wanted, he gave me a great experience. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 000998933
What is greatness? I will answer: it is the capacity to live by the three fundamental values of John Galt: reason, purpose, self-esteem. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001001742
As a matter of fact, the person who loves everybody and feels at home everywhere is the true hater of mankind. He expects nothing of men, so no form of depravity can outrage him. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001002480
Any human being who accepts the help of another, knows that good will is the giver's only motive and that good will is the payment he owes in return. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001004811
Just as man can't exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one's rights into reality, to think, to work and keep the results, which means: the right of property. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001005430
A good novel is an indivisible sum: every scene, sequence and passage of a good novel has to involve, contribute to and advance all three of its major attributes: theme, plot, characterization. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001005484
A building has integrity, just as a man and just as seldom! It must be true to its own idea, have its own form, and serve its own purpose!. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001008465
If one doesn't respect oneself one can have neither love nor respect for others. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001008756
Love is our response to our highest values. The noblest love is born out of admiration of another's values. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001010419
I keep thinking that insanity is a state where a person can't tell what's real. Well, what's real now is insane - and if I accepted it as real, I'd have to lose my mind, wouldn't -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001012501
He knew that the conference was a trap; he knew also that he was walking into it with nothing for any trappers to gain. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001014753
There can be no justification for choosing any part of that which one knows to be evil. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001014761
When you have established that one alternative is good and the other is evil, there is no justification for the choice of a mixture. There is no justification ever for choosing any part of what you know to be evil. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001018957
The skyline of New York is a monument of a splendour that no pyramids or palaces will ever equal or approach. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001019265
You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001019894
How did you do it? How did you manage to remain unmangled?"
"By holding on to just one rule."
"Which?"
"To place nothing-nothing-above the verdict of my own mind. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001020581
It's the masters who despise the slaves, and the slaves who hate the masters. I don't know who is which. Maybe it doesn't fit here. Maybe it does. I don't know -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001022899
Man's mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001023082
Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001026529
The men I was fighting were impotent. The shiftless, the purposeless, the irresponsible, the irrational - it was not I who needed them, it was not theirs to dictate terms to me, it was not mine to obey demands. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001026794
The causes of illusions are not pretty to discover. They're either vicious or tragic. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001027411
In architecture, mediocrity is more glaringly obvious than in other lines - because there's a huge, physical object such as a building to demonstrate it. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001027612
He defeated her by admitting her power; she could not have the gratification of enforcing it. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001027627
Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001028287
Thought is a primitive superstition. Reason is an irrational idea. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001031024
The worst evil that you can do, psychologically, is to laugh at yourself. That means spitting in your own face. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001031954
But there are people who'll try to hurt you through the good they see in you
knowing that it's the good, needing it and punishing you for it. Don't let it break you when you discover that. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001032332
Do not set out to write with your eyes on the box office. It can't be done. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001033586
It's not a question of who will allow me to do it, it's a question of who will stop me. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001034094
To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001035890
Art is inextricably tied to man's survival - not to his physical survival, but to that on which his physical survival depends: to the preservation and survival of his consciousness. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001037102
Every coercive monopoly was created by government intervention into the economy: by special privileges, such as franchises or subsidies, which closed the entry of competitors into a given field, by legislative action. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001037288
I love you, Dominique. As selfishly as the fact that I exist. As selfishly as my lungs breathe air. I breathe for my own necessity, for the fuel of my body, for my survival. I've given you, not my sacrifice or my pity, but my ego and my naked need. This is the only way I can want you to love me. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001037346
Is it advisable to spread out all the conveniences of culture before people to whom a few steps up a stair to a library is a sufficient deterrent from reading? -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001039519
The action of naming an issue instead of evading it, was so unlike the usual behavior of all the men he knew, it was such a sudden, startling relief ... -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001039696
He was described as the literary leader of the age, but had never written a book that sold more than three thousand copies. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001040116
[Altruism] is a moral system which holds that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the sole justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, value and virtue. This is the moral base of collectivism, of all dictatorships. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001040214
This box is useless," said Alliance 6-7349.
Should it be what they claim of it," said Harmony 9-2642, "then it would bring ruin to the Department of Candles. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001043253
Love is a response to values. It is with a person's sense of life that one falls in love - with that essential sum, that fundamental stand or way of facing existence, which is the essence of a personality. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001043418
Do you want me to remind you that you once swore to make my happiness aim of your life? And that you cant say in all honesty whether i am happy or unhappy, because you haven't even inquired whether i exist? -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001045985
The capacity for unclouded enjoyment, she thought, does not belong to irresponsible fools; an inviolate peace of spirit is not the achievement of a drifter; to be able to laugh like that is the end result of the most profound, most solemn thinking. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001048996
There are two aspects of man's existence which are the special province and expression of his sense of life: love and art. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001052142
Without property rights, no other rights are possible. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001052604
What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" Ellsworth asked: "Then, in order to be truly wealthy, a man should collect souls? -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001054054
The worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001054352
The purpose of the law is not to prevent a future offense, but to punish the one actually committed. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001055561
One loses everything when one loses one's sense of humor. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001055912
In a free society, one does not have to deal with those who are irrational. One is free to avoid them. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001057502
An irresponsible person is a person who makes vague promises, then breaks his word, blames it on circumstances and expects other people to forgive it. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001057984
The political function of 'the right of free speech' is to protect dissenters and unpopular minorities from forcible suppression - not to guarantee them the support, advantages, and rewards of a popularity they have not gained. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001058228
I think. I am. I will. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001058319
Money is the barometer of society's virtue. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001059605
The unrecognized genius-that's one old story. Have you ever thought of a much worse one-the genius recognized too well? -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001061725
He has once built his fortune, starting out with empty hands; now he had to rebuild his life, starting out with an empty spirit -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001061825
One of the methods used by statists to destroy capitalism consists in establishing controls that tie a given industry hand and foot, making it unable to solve its problems, then declaring that freedom has failed and stronger controls are necessary.=Ayn Rand -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001061873
And no one rose to ask the question: Good?-by what standard?
John Galt -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001063315
Fear walks through the City, fear without name, without shape. All men feel it and none dare to speak. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001064379
The problem is not those who dream, but those who can only dream. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001065406
Creation comes before distribution
or there will be nothing to distribute. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001067946
If workers struggle for higher wages, this is hailed as "social gains", if businessmen struggle for higher profits, this is damned as "selfish greed". -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001068412
You are never called upon to prove a negative. that's a law of logic. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001071106
I had to originate a philosophical framework of my own, because my basic view of man and existence was theories. In order to define, explain and present my concept of man, I had to become a philosopher in the specific meaning of the term. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001073318
A leash is a rope with a noose at both ends. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001080336
It was a satisfying bravery; it never aroused antagonism. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001080735
You will follow me, if we are what we are, you and I, if we live, if the world exists, if you know the meaning of this moment and can't let it slip by, as others let it slip, into the senselessness of the unwilled and unreached. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001081666
Why no. I'm too conceited. If you want to call it that. I don't make
comparisons. I never think of myself in relation to anyone else. I just refuse
to measure myself as part of anything. I'm an utter egotist. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001082466
You have sacrificed justice to mercy. You have sacrificed independence to unity. You have sacrificed reason to faith. You have sacrificed wealth to need. You have sacrificed self-esteem to self-denial. You have sacrificed happiness to duty. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001082958
A man of independent judgment is a man of profound self-esteem. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001084949
The right to agree with others is not a problem in any society; it is the right to disagree that is crucial. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001085922
Before you can do things for people, you must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the secondary consequences. The work, not the people. Your own action, not any possible object of your charity. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001085923
Peter, before you can do things for people, you must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the secondary consequences. The work, not the people. (578) -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001086186
I take no pride in hopeless longing; I wouldn't hold a stillborn aspiration. I'd want to have it, to make it, to live it. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001089987
Isn't it wonderful that our bodies can give us so much pleasure? he said to her once, quite simply. They were happy and radiantly innocent. They were both incapable of the conception that joy is sin. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001090301
This was reality, she thought, this sense of clear outlines, of purpose, of lightness, of hope. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001090332
He was searching for words to name his meaning without naming it, she thought, to make her understand that which he did not want to be understood. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001091325
When unlimited and unrestricted by individual rights a government is men's deadliest enemy. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001092406
The right to vote is a consequence, not a primary cause, of a free social system - and its value depends on the constitutional structure implementing and strictly delimiting the voters' power; unlimited majority rule is an instance of the principle of tyranny. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001096942
The Argument from Intimidation is a confession of intellectual impotence. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001097080
If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001098754
Whose steps were a restless substitute for flight. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001099398
When a man feels fear without reason, you call him to the attention of a psychiatrist; you are not so careful to protect the meaning, the nature and the dignity of love. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001100896
The prospect of experiencing pleasure was not worth the effort; he had no desire to experience pleasure. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001102491
The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001103716
No action could be lower or more futile than for one person to throw upon another the burden of his abdication of choice. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001103737
The only guilt of the victims, he thought, had been that they accepted it as guilt. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001104391
No gift is worth a damn, unless its the most precious thing you've got. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001104746
The man-worshipers, in my sense of the term, are those who see man's highest potential and strive to actualize it. The man-haters are those who regard man as a helpless, depraved, contemptible creature-and struggle never to let him discover otherwise. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001106120
We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001107123
If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001108864
he watched it with curiosity. It was strange to be conscious of another person's existence, to feel it as a close, urgent necessity; a necessity without qualifications, neither pleasant nor painful, merely final like an ultimatum. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001109168
The walls are cracked and water runs upon them within threads without sound, black and glistening as blood. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001113568
It was a sudden, stunned state of quiet drunkenness, complete in itself, their hair mingled like the rays of two bodies in space that had achieved their meeting, she saw that he walked with his eyes closed, as if even sight would now be an intrusion. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001115498
It was a race he was running now, a race between his rent money and ... he did not know the name of the other contestant. Perhaps it was every man whom he passed on the street. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001116576
A good quotation must be a complete entity. It must be like a headline - sharp, clear, whole. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001118214
The theory that holds "good blood" or "bad blood" as a moral-intellectual criterion , can lead to nothing but torrents of blood in practice. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001121999
In times like these, when their fat little comforts are threatened, you may be sure that science is the first thing men will sacrifice. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001126240
Those who grant sympathy to guilt, grant none to innocence. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001126580
It was not the mockery of malice - it was the laughter of a salute. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001126922
A society without intellectuals is like a body without a head -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001128903
Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001130069
Observe the ugly mess which most men make of their sex lives - and observe the mess of contradictions which they hold as their moral philosophy. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001130393
I'm not going to help you pretend - by arguing with you - that the reality you're talking about is not what it is, that there's still a way to make it work and to save your neck. There isn't. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001132202
I do not seek the good of others as a sanction for my right to exist, nor do I recognize the good of others as a justification for their seizure of my property or their destruction of my life. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001132253
What is morality, she asked.
Judgement to distinguish right and wrong, vision to see the truth, and courage to act upon it, dedication to that which is good, integrity to stand by the good at any price. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001132488
To the extent to which a man is rational, life is the premise directing his actions. To the extent to which he is irrational, the premise directing his actions is death. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001132558
We cannot say what they meant, for there are no words for their meaning, but we know it without words and we knew it then. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001132697
People who are afraid to sacrifice somebody have no business talking about a common purpose. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001133905
Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own - they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal - for a mind to respect and an achievement to admire. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001134002
Howard, everything you've done in your life is wrong according to the stated ideals of mankind. And here you are. And somehow it seems a huge joke on the whole world. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001134215
We have met once," she said, "at the Holcombes. If Mr. Roark remembers. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001137306
There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001138415
For this wire is as a part of our body, as a vein torn from us, glowing with our blood. Are we proud of this thread of metal, or of our hands which made it, or is there a line to divide these two? -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001139675
We'll meet again. We'll meet when years have passed, and years make such a difference, don't they? -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001139889
So I want to say that of all the people I have known, you are the only person I regret leaving behind. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001140552
He thought--while his hand moved rapidly--what a power there was in words; later, for those who heard them, but first for the one who found them; a healing power, a solution, like the breaking of a barrier. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001141099
Romantic art is the fuel and the spark plug of a Man's soul. It's task is to set a soul on fire and never let it go out. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001142890
In this world, either you're virtuous or you enjoy yourself. Not both, lady, not both. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001144142
We are all brothers under the skin - and I, for one, would be willing to skin humanity to prove it. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001145315
What do I "think" of President Reagan? The best answer to give would be: I don't think of him. And the more I see, the less I think. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001146837
The freedom of speech of private individuals includes the right to not agree, not to listen, and not to finance one's own antagonists. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001148762
To me-the foulest man on earth, more contemptible than a criminal, is the man who rejects men for being too good. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001151786
there comes a point, in the defeat of any man of virtue, when his own consent is needed for evil to win - and -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001152914
For five days and nights, she had fought a single desire - to go to him. To see him alone - anywhere - his home or his office or the street - for one word or only one glance - but alone. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001153133
There are no defenders of man's mind - in the world's greatest scientific-technological civilization. All that is left is a battle between the mystics of spirit and the mystics of muscle - between men guided by their feelings and men guided by their reflexes. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001153601
We are now moving towards complete collectivism or socialism, a system under which everybody is enslaved to everybody. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001154574
Pleasure is nought but virtue's gayer name
I wrong her still, I rate her worth too low: Virtue the root, and pleasure is the flow'r. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001154695
What in hell are you really made of, Howard? After all, it's only a building. It's not the combination of holy sacrament, Indian torture, and sexual ecstasy that you seem to make of it."
"Isn't it? -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001156563
She had always avoided personal reactions, but she was forced to break her rule when she saw the expression on his face. She burst out laughing. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001158263
He borrowed from others in order to make an impression on others. There's your actual selflessness. It's his ego that he's betrayed and given up. But everybody calls him selfish. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001158272
Your ego is the strictest judge.
-Howard Roark in his speech at his trial. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001159330
What is a demanding pleasure that demands the use of ones mind! Not in the sense of problem solving, but in the sense of exercising discrimination, judgment, awareness. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001159757
Whatever it was, he thought, whatever the strain and the agony, they were worth it, because they had made him reach this day -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001161251
But he still thought it self-evident that one had to do what was right; he had never learned how people could want to do otherwise; he had learned only that they did. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001162178
Economic strength to make a start. How do you expect -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001162327
She felt that his presence seemed more intensely real when she kept her eyes away from him, almost as if the stressed awareness of herself came from him, like the sunlight from the water. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001162707
Why yes, I can,' said Midas Mulligan, when he was asked whether he could name a person more evil than the man with a heart closed to pity. 'The man who uses another's pity for him as a weapon. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001163187
She was looking at his face; it was the face she had known ... There was no sign of tragedy, no bitterness, no tension - only the radiant mockery, matured and stressed, the look of dangerously unpredictable amusement, and the great, guiltless serenity of spirit. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001163303
I Have No Faith at All. I Only Hold Convictions -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001168583
This, in every hour and every issue, is your basic moral choice: thinking or non-thinking, existence or non-existence, A or non-A, entity or zero. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001170272
I, I am the day after tomorrow. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001171058
Two things were impossible to him: to stand still or to move aimlessly. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001172650
The only thing that counts in life is solid, material assets. It's no time for theories when everything is falling to pieces around us. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001174652
While, politically, a mixed economy preserves the semblance of an organized society with a semblance of law and order, economically it is the equivalent of the chaos that had ruled China for centuries: a chaos of robber gangs looting-and draining-the productive elements of the country. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001176026
Value is that which one acts to gain and/or keep. Virtue is the act by which one aims and/or keeps it. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001176812
Contrary to the ecologists, nature does not stand still and does not maintain the kind of equilibrium that guarantees the survival of any particular species - least of all the survival of her greatest and most fragile product: man. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001177553
I think, therefore I'll think. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001178141
One can't love man without hating most of the creatures who pretend to bear his name. It's one or the other. One doesn't love God and sacrilege impartially. Except when one doesn't know that sacrilege has been committed. Because one doesn't know God. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001178155
But the mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought. An agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise or an average drawn upon many individual thoughts. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001178816
Talent alone is helpless today. Any success requires both talent and luck. And the 'luck' has to be helped along and provided by someone. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001180405
If you write a line of only zeroes, is still nothing -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001181048
Compromise now, because you'll have to later, anyway, only then you'll have gone through things you'll wish you hadn't. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001182061
He knew, for the moment, that he felt affection for Roark; an affection that held pain, astonishment and helplessness. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001187138
Don't bother to examine a folly-ask yourself only what it accomplishes. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001190958
Who was it that said he needed a fulcrum? Give me an unobstructed right-of-way and I'll show them how to move the earth! -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001192532
Plot is a primitive vulgarity in literature, said Balph Eubank contemptuously. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001192687
Your emotional capacity is an empty motor, and your values are the fuel with which your mind fills it. If you choose a mix of contradictions, it will clog your motor, corrode your transmission and wreck you on your first attempt to move with a machine which you, the driver, have corrupted. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001195580
Capitalism is not the system of the past; it is the system of the future
if mankind is to have a future -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001196586
What was happening to him? - he wondered. The impossible conflict of feeling reluctance to do that which was right - wasn't it the basic formula of moral corruption? To recognize one's guilt, yet feel nothing but the coldest, most profound indifference. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001198457
But what man does out of despair, is not necessarily a key to his character. I have always thought that the real key is in that which he seeks for his enjoyment. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001199019
All depressions are caused by government interference and the cure is always offered to take more of the poison that caused the disaster. Depressions are not the result of a free economy. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001200273
Believing in fate produces fate. Believing in freedom will create infinite possibilities. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001200454
If that which we have found is the corruption of solitude, then what can men wish for save corruption? If this is the great evil of being alone, than what is good and what is evil? -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001201290
To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That's what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul - would you understand why that's much harder? -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001201815
Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind, and a step that travels unlimited roads -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001203571
You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001204215
I do not seek to derive my happiness from the injury or the favor of others, but earn it by my own achievement. Just -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001207200
A culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiate d masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001207912
No," said Toohey. "You ask what he'd do if he couldn't be an architect."
"He'd walk over corpses. Any and all of them. All of us. But he'd be an architect. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001208484
Ah, there's nothing like tea in the afternoon. When the British Empire collapses, historians will find that it had made but two invaluable contributions to civilization - this tea ritual and the detective novel. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001208758
Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth, the man who would make his fortune no matter where he started. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001210605
Jim, I studied engineering in college. When I see things, I see them. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001211318
This miracle of me is mine to own and keep, and mine to guard, and mine to use, and mine to kneel before! -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001211423
That is the psychology of a murderer who's committed the perfect crime and then confesses because he can't bear the idea that nobody knows it's a perfect crime. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001211676
You have forbidden me to look for you, you may damn me, you may choose to discard me ... but by the right of the fact that I am alive, I must know that you are ... I must see you this once.
- Dagny Taggart -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001212869
We shall sleep on moss for many nights, till the beasts of the body come to tear our body. We have no bed now, save the moss,and no future, save the beasts. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001213606
In a capitalist society, all human relationships are voluntary. Men are free to cooperate or not, to deal with one another or not, as their own individual judgments, convictions and interests dictate. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001214227
and the degree of a man's productiveness is the degree of his reward. This -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001217465
Every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics - a rational ethics - as a precondition of rebirth. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001217723
We asked so many questions that the Teachers forbade it. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001219568
that's crumbling back into -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001220031
The hours ahead, like all her nights with him, would be added, she thought, to that savings account of one's life where moments of time are stored in the pride of having been lived. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001223105
... because happiness was the greatest agent pf purification. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001223148
To count upon his virtue and use it as an instrument of torture, to practice blackmail with the victim's generosity as sole means of extortion, to accept the gift of a man's good will and turn it into a tool for the giver's destruction. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001223248
I am interested in politics only in order to secure and protect freedom. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001223586
Only a thin steel ring that cut the rocks in half. The rocks went on into the depth, unchanged. They began -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001224924
men will not cease to desire the impossible and will not lose their longing to destroy - so long as self-destruction and self-sacrifice are preached to them as the practical means of achieving the happiness of the recipients. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001226384
You must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the secondary consequences. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001228741
If we don't use ugly words, we won't have any ugliness -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001229369
I love to look at you. I always think of what Gordon Prescott said. He said that you are God's perfect exercise in structural mathematics. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001230117
The anti-mind is the anti-life. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001230119
Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001230120
There is a morality of reason, a morality proper to man, and Man's Life is its standard of value.
All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys it is the evil. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001233574
Now you see, Dr. Stadler, you're speaking as if this book were addressing to a thinking audience. If it were, one would have to be concerned with such matters as accuracy, validity, logic and the prestige of science. But it isn't. It's addressed to the public. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001237564
Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001237709
that heavy, indifferent lassitude which is not the will to laziness, but the frustration of the will to a secret violence that no lesser action can satisfy. That -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001238593
The greatest threat to mankind and civilization is the spread of the totalitarian philosophy. Its best ally is not the devotion of its followers but the confusion of its enemies. To fight it, we must understand it. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001240085
The field of extrospection is based on two cardinal questions: "What do I know?" and "How do I know it?" In the field of introspection, the two guiding questions are: "What do I feel?" and "Why do I feel it?" Most -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001240591
Do not let the hero in your soul parish, in lonely frustration, for the life you deserved but never have been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won. It exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001241144
Roark walked now to these drawings; they were the first things to be packed. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001241681
You are damned, and we wish to share your damnation. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001242106
Don't think. Believe. Trust your heart, not your brain. Don't think. Feel. Believe. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001242946
Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001243829
If you know that this life is all that you have, wouldn't you make the most of it? -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001244214
Art is the indispensable medium for the communication of a moral ideal ... -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001248046
I do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and I do not live in chronic dread of disaster. It is no happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that I regard as the abnormal exception in Human Life. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001248707
Do you think nobody would willingly entrust his children to you and pay you for teaching them? Why do you have to extort your fees and collect your pupils by compulsion? -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001248987
This is the age othe common man, they tell us-a title which any man may claim to the extent osuch distinction as he has managed not to achieve. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001251201
If you get caught at some crucial point and somebody tells you that your doctrine doesn't make sense - you're ready for him. You tell him there's something above sense. That here he must not try to think, he must feel. He must believe. Suspend reason and you can play it deuces wild. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001252410
We lived by that which we held to be good and punished that which we held to be evil. You live by that which you denounce as evil and punish that which you know to be good. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001252422
I saw that evil was impotent - that evil was the irrational, the blind, the anti-real - and that the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001254225
If you tell an amateur that his story is not good, he always declares indignantly: 'Oh, but it really happened just like this!' The writer who doesn't understand that this is beside the point is not a writer at all. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001255015
Men prosper or fail, survive or perish in proportion to the degree of their rationality. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001257347
And he said her name to fill the space of five years. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001257791
I am, therefore I'll think -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001258455
Always feel as if I were reading to you a carbon copy of myself and you've already seen the original. You seem to hear everything I say a minute in advance. We're unsynchronized." "You call that unsynchronized?" "All right. Too well synchronized. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001258964
Why should you care about the others?" "Because I like to understand things, and there's something about people that I can't understand. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001260619
I think it's a worthy undertaking
to provide a decent apartment for a man who earns fifteen dollars a week. But not at the expense of other men. Not if it raises the taxes, raises all the other rents and makes the man who earns forty live in a rat hole. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001260706
If you don't know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001261496
This was the simple essence of his universe: the instantaneous refusal to submit to disaster, the irresistible drive to fight it, the triumphant feeling of his own ability to win. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001261516
For they have nothing to fight me with, save the brute force of their numbers. I have my mind. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001261533
We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001261680
The source of work? Man's mind ... man's reasoning mind. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001262565
Dagny heard a cold, implacable voice saying somewhere within her: Remember it - remember it well - it is not often that one can see pure evil - look at it ... -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001264168
Who is John Galt? -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001267331
I am an intransigent atheist, though not a militant one. This means that I am not fighting against religion - I am fighting for reason. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001267865
Everything bad comes from the mind, because the mind asks too many questions. It is blessed to believe, not to understand. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001268218
To rest one's case on faith means to concede that reason is on the side of one's enemies- that one has no rational arguments to offer. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001269165
It's not that I don't suffer, it's that I know the unimportance of suffering. I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one's soul and as a permanent scar across one's view of existence. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001269449
The only pride of her workday was not that it had been lived, but that it had been survived. It was wrong, she thought, it was viciously wrong that one should ever be forced to say that about any hour of one's life. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001269728
We are not used to persons who do things simply for the love of god whom they don't believe in. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001269781
Today, intelligence is neither recognized nor rewarded, but is being systematically extinguished in a growing flood of brazenly flaunted irrationality. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001270008
There are no contradictions. If you find one, check your premises. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001272403
Were she lying crushed under the ruins of a building, were she torn by the bomb of an air raid, so long as she was still in existence she would know that action is man's foremost obligation, regardless of anything he feels ... -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001273207
To discuss evil in a manner implying neutrality, is to sanction it. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001275176
I kept seeing you as you were. I couldn't forget it. And that you should have become what you are - that does not belong in a rational universe." "No? And the world as you see it around you does?" "You were not the kind of man who gets broken by any kind of world. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001275181
She fought like an animal. But she made no sound. She did not call for help. She heard the echoes of her blows in a gasp of his breath, and she knew that it was a gasp of pleasure. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001277005
At every step of her rise, she did the work long before she was granted the title. It was like advancing through empty rooms. Nobody opposed her, yet nobody approved of her progress. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001282479
Happiness? But that is so middle-class. What is happiness? There are so many things in life so much more important than happiness. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001283578
Reason is not automatic. Those that deny it cannot be conquered by it. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001284035
You have no choice about your capacity to feel that something is good for you or evil, but what you will consider good or evil, what will give you joy or pain, what you will love or hate, desire or fear, depends on your standard of value. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001284284
Emotions are inherent in your nature, but their content is dictated by your mind. Your emotional capacity is an empty motor, and your values are the fuel with which your mind fills it. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001285121
The justice which would forgive miles of innocent errors of knowledge, would not forgive a single step taken in conscious evil. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001288514
The creator's concern is the conquest of nature. The parasite's concern is the conquest of men. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001289390
You'd let the whole world perish rather than soil that immaculate self of yours with a single spot of which you'd have to be ashamed. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001289723
Those who wish to deal with me, must do so on my terms or not at all. I do not make terms with incompetence. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001291069
I am in full agreement with the facts of everything said about me in the newspapers - with the facts, but not with the evaluation. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001293038
A house can have integrity, just like a person,' said Roark, 'and just as seldom. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001293527
She had never done these things before; she did them expertly. She had a capacity for action, a competence that clashed incongruously with her appearance. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001293706
He demonstrated that there was no such thing as free will, since men's creative impulses were determined, as all else, by the economic structure of the epoch in which they lived. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001296654
The penalizing of ability for being ability, the penalizing of success for being success, and the sacrifice of productive genius to the demands of envious mediocrity. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001297446
Within the extent of your knowledge, you are right. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001297641
I've always thought that a feeling which changes never existed in the first place. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001298283
Failing to have a cake after one has eaten it, is not a compromise. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001301463
Her work was all she had or wanted. But there were times, like tonight, when she felt that sudden, peculiar emptiness, which was not emptiness, but silence, not despair, but immobility, as if nothing within her were destroyed, but everything stood still. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001302092
They have to take a chance, everything they do is taking a chance, but they feel so much safer when they take it on something they know to be ugly, vain and stupid. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001302361
I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001302520
There was a great satisfaction to be found in the food which we need and obtain by our own hand. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001306240
Money is just a tool. It will take you anywhere you want, but you have to be the driver -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001307631
A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001308557
Civilization is the process of setting man free from men. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001310693
Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade ... -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001310815
I say that man is entitled to his own happiness and that he must achieve it himself. But that he cannot demand that others give up their lives to make him happy. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001311648
Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of other men. Blood, whips and guns
or dollars. Take your choice
there is no other. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001312551
Evil requires the sanction of the victim. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001312568
The joke is on both of you. Your sanction is the only source of certainty he has. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001312984
We are one in all and all in one. There are no men but only the great WE, One, indivisible and forever. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001315243
Whatever road I take, the guiding star is within me; the guiding star and the loadstone which point the way. They point in but one direction. They point to me. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001315663
It is a free market that makes monopolies impossible. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001315664
I am not morally obligated to care more for a man than he cares for himself. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001315665
... if the majority of men cannot know what is good for them, each for himself, how can they know what is good for others by proxy? If they are to be controlled by specialists, how and by what standard can they choose the specialist? -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001315666
A gracefully effortless floating, flowing and flying are the essentials of the ballet's image of man. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001315667
Government "help" to business is just as disastrous as government persecution ... the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001315668
He hated stupidity. It was the only emotion I had ever seen him display toward people - a -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001315669
A rational man knows-or makes it a point to discover-the source of his emotions, the basic premises from which they come. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001315670
Of course I'm all right, professor. I had to be. A is A.- John Galt -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001315671
In the temple of his spirit, each man is alone. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001315672
He looked at the paper before him. He wondered why ineptitude should exist and have its say. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001315673
A mystic is a man who treats his feelings as tools of cognition. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001315674
But we, Equality 7-2521, are glad to be living. If this is a vice, then we wish no virtue. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001315675
There were things in my past which I have not liked. But all the things of which I was proud will remain. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001315676
Say, do you know that gorgeous creature over there? -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001315677
If he can give his readers no reason why they should read his book, except that the events happened to him, it is not a valid book. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001315678
Beauty is a sense of harmony. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001315679
A right doesn't include the material implementation of that right by other men;
it includes only the freedom to earn that implementation by one's own effort. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001315680
Action without thought is mindlessness, and thought without action is hypocritical. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001316903
She nodded silently, unable to name as joy any part of the things she felt. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001321617
I threw it down the air shaft. There's a concrete floor below. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001324754
If I can't, then that would make it an absolute and you said there aren't any absolutes." "That's different." "How is it different?" "It's the government." "You mean, there aren't any absolutes except the government?" "I mean, if they say it's important, then it is. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001325412
We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001325566
A quest for self-respect is proof of its lack -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001326165
He had to stand on guard against his own feeling - as if some part of him had become a stranger that had to be kept numb, and his will had to be its constant, watchful anesthetic. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001327488
If an uncompromising stand is to be smeared as 'extremism,' then that smear is directed at any devotion to values, any loyalty to principles, any profound conviction, any consistency, any steadfastness, any passion, any dedication to an unbreached, inviolate truth
any man of integrity. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001328543
The truth is not for all men but only for those who seek it. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001329431
Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001331943
The human shapes moving past him in the streets of the city were physical objects without any meaning. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001332196
I am only concerned with politics so I may see the day when I don't have to be concerned with politics. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001333816
That's a cute sentence: the years to come. Why are you so sure they're coming? -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001334460
Anything may be betrayed, anyone may be forgiven. But not those who lack the courage of their own greatness. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001337273
The creators were not selfless. It is the whole secret of their power - that it was self-sufficient, self-motivated, self-generated. A first cause, a fount of energy, a life force, a Prime Mover. The creator served nothing and no one. He lived for himself. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001337957
You can fake virtue for an audience. You can't fake it in your own eyes. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001339810
the usual looters' slogan of 'public welfare, -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001350995
Helplessness was a strange experience, new to her; she had never found it hard to face things and make decisions; but she was not dealing with things - this was a fog without shapes or definitions, in which something kept forming and shifting before it could be seen ... -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001352350
Men who reject the responsibility of thought and reason can only exist as parasites on the thinking of others. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001352445
To be the kind of writer you want to be, you must first be the kind of thinker you want to be. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001353123
Fransisco, what's the most depraved type of human being?
-The man without purpose. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001355200
Self respect is something that can't be killed. The worst thing is to kill a man's pretense at it. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001355327
That an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001355966
I shall answer all the questions you are afraid to ask me openly. Do I wish to pay my workers more than their services are worth to me? I do not. Do I wish to sell my product for less than my customers are willing to pay me? I do not. Do I wish to sell it at a loss or give it away? I do not. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001356252
Dangers, to Francisco, were merely opportunities for another brilliant performance; there were no battles he could lose, no enemies to beat him. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001356798
Psychologically, the choice "to think or not" is the choice "to focus or not." Existentially, the choice "to focus or not" is the choice "to be conscious or not." Metaphysically, the choice "to be conscious or not" is the choice of life or death. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001359946
Of any achievements open to you, the one that makes all others possible is the creation of your own character - that -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001360077
You know what you are actually in love with? Integrity. The impossible. The clean, consistent, reasonable, self-faithful, the all-of-one-style, like a work of art. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001361504
Religion is a primitive form of philosophy, [the] attempt to offer a comprehensive view of reality. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001361653
Those who speak of love most promiscuously are the ones who've never felt it. They make some sort of feeble stew out of sympathy, compassion, contempt and general indifference, and they call it love. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001362478
Don't try it."
"What?"
"To win any battle when I set the terms."
She did not answer. She was struck by what the words made her feel; it was not an emotion, but a physical sensation of pleasure ... -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001362600
Dagny," he said, looking at the city as it moved past their taxi window, "think of the first man who thought of making a steel girder. He knew what he saw, what he thought and what he wanted. He did not say, 'It seems to me,' and he did not take orders from those who say, 'In my opinion. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001362898
I made my fortune by being able to spot a certain kind of man. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001363695
Men have died in torture chambers, on the stake, in concentration camps, in front of firing squads, rather than renounce their convictions. The appeaser renounces his under the pressure of a frown on a vacant face. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001365331
A hint of the smile remained in his features at all times, particularly when he listened; it was a look of good-natured amusement, as if he were swiftly and patiently discarding the irrelevant in the words he heard and going straight to the point a moment ahead of the speaker. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001365349
Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001365772
The victims are the ones who made injustice possible. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001365970
Unjust laws have to be fought ideologically; they cannot be fought or corrected by means of mere disobedience and futile martyrdom. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001366313
She was fifteen when it occurred to her for the first time that women did not run railroads and that people might object. To hell with that, she thought- and never worried about it again. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001368508
There's nothing as significant as a human face. Nor as eloquent. We can never really know another person, except by our first glance at him. Because, in that glance, we know everything. Even though we're not always wise enough to unravel the knowledge. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001368815
The Council of American Builders met once a month and engaged in no tangible activity beyond listening to speeches and sipping an inferior brand of root beer. Its membership did not grow fast in quantity or quality. There were no concrete results achieved. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001369406
There are two side to every issue. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001370138
A moment or an eternity - did it matter? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001373023
Times change, and people change with the times - the wise ones do. Wisdom lies in knowing when to remember and when to forget. Consistency is not a habit of mind which it is wise to practice or to expect of the human race. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001373596
That was the real sentence imposed upon him, he thought - to discover what idea, what simple idea available to the simplest man, had made mankind accept the doctrines that led it to self-destruction. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001374755
When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is learning to understand and control the behavior of crop plants and domestic animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001375375
There is no such dichotomy as 'human rights' versus 'property rights.' No human rights can exist without property rights. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001375842
Tension seemed natural to her, not a sign of anxiety, but a sign of enjoyment ... -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001376072
I do not wish to work in a world that regards me as a slave. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001376297
Writing is serious business and not for any stray bastard that wants to try it. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001378978
clothes displayed an artist's infinite attention to details. He wished, as he descended the steps, that this were a -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001379505
What objectivity and the study of philosophy requires is not an 'open mind,' but an active mind - a mind able and eagerly willing to examine ideas, but to examine them criticially. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001380276
It was new to feel protected, and to feel that it was right to accept the protection, to surrender - right, because this peculiar sense of safety was ... not the protection of being spared from battle, but of having won it, not a protection granted to her weakness, but to her strength ... -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001383239
I feel that others live up to me, if they want me. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001386385
Every loneliness is a pinnacle -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001387336
The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001387418
But those who were young had no thought left for spring and those who still thought were not young any longer. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001389283
It's as if they'd heard that there are values one is supposed to honor and this is what one does to honor them
so they went through the motions, like ghosts pulled by some sort of distant echoes from a better age. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001389291
Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001389591
Thinking men cannot be ruled; ambitious men do not stagnate. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001391575
This is the strike of the men of the mind, Miss Taggart. This is the mind on strike. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001393582
We fell, but we never let the box fall from our hands. Then we ran. We ran blindly, and men and houses streaked past us in a torrent without shape. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001394242
The purpose of philosophy is not to help men find a meaning in life, but to prove to them that there isn't any -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001399011
Hank, this is great."
"Yes."
He said it simply, openly. There was no flattered pleasure in his voice, and no modesty. This, she knew, was a tribute to her, the rarest one person could pay another: the tribute of feeling free to acknowledge one's own greatness, knowing that it is understood. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001401043
Man's motive power is his moral code. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001404675
Joy is the goal of existence, and joy is not to be stumbled upon, but to be achieved, and the act of treason is to let its vision drown in the swamp of the moment's torture. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001405399
Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001407015
She marveled at the futility of his method: he was acting as if, by naming her opinion in advance, he would make her unable to alter it. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001407333
Do you know the hallmark of the second-rater? It's resentment of another man's achievement. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001408610
Dagny's bearing seemed almost indecent, because this was the way a woman would have faced a ballroom centuries ago, when the act of displaying one's half-naked body for the admiration of men was an act of daring, when it had meaning, and but one meaning, acknowledged by all as a high adventure. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001409539
Nobody can tell what the course of a country's future may be. It is not a matter of calculable trends, but a chaos subject to the rule of the moment, in which anything is possible. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001411249
Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001413330
I understand that centuries of chains and lashes will not kill the spirit of man nor the sense of truth within him.

~Equality 7-2521 (as Prometheus), pg 98 -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001413394
If [people] place such things as friendship and family ties above their own productive work, yes, then they are immoral. Friendship, family life and human relationships are not primary in a man's life. A man who places others first, above his own creative work, is an emotional parasite. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001413920
It's a curse, you know, to be able to look higher than you're allowed to reach. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001415170
Ideas cannot be fought except by means of better ideas. The battle consists, not of opposing, but of exposing; not of denouncing, but of disproving; not of evading, but of boldly proclaiming a full, consistent, and radical alternative. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001415535
Collectivism answers: The power of society is unlimited. Society may make any laws it wishes, and force them upon anyone in any manner it wishes. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001415538
Collectivism is the ancient principle of savagery. ... Collectivism is not the 'New Order of Tomorrow.' It is the order of a very dark yesterday. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001415539
People are not embracing collectivism because they have accepted bad economics. They are accepting bad economics because they have embraced collectivism. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001417087
Doctors are not servants of their patients, they are traders like everyone else in a free society and they should bear that title proudly considering the crucial importance of the services they offer. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001417471
Things stood still, not a leaf trembled on the branches, while the sky slowly lost its color and became an expanse that looked like the spread of glowing water. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001422323
An artist reveals his naked soul in his work - and so, gentle reader, do you when you respond to it. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001423308
Don't tell me your evaluation. Give me the facts. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001423469
We waste our energy fighting one another, instead of presenting a common front to the world. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001425003
If a life can have a 'theme-song' - and I believe every worthwhile one has - mine is [best] expressed in one word: Individualism. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001429144
The houses stood like men in unpressed suits, who had lost the desire to stand straight: -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001430411
A government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001430458
Contrary to the vulgar belief that men are motivated primarily by materialistic considerations, we now see the capitalist system being discredited and destroyed all over the world, even though this system has given men the greatest material comforts. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001430764
She thought that relaxation was attractive only in those for whom it was an unnatural state; then even limpness acquired purpose. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001431324
It is against the sin of forgiveness that I wanted to warn you. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001432791
She wondered at the joyous, proud comfort to be found in a sense of the finite, in the knowledge that the field of one's concern lay within the realm of one's sight. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001435769
Romantic art is always stylized: the better the art, the cleaner and more attractive and intelligent the stylization. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001436419
It meant nothing to him any longer, only a faint tinge of sadness
and somewhere within him, a drop of pain moving briefly and vanishing, like a raindrop on the glass of a window, its course in the shape of a question mark. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001439640
But, in fact, a person's sexual choice is the result and sum of their fundamental convictions. Tell me what a person finds sexually attractive and I will tell you their entire philosophy of life. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001440324
What whip lashed them to their knees in shame and submission? The worship of the word We. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001443402
It is the basic, metaphysical fact of man's nature
the connection between his survival and his use of reason
that capitalism recognizes and protects. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001444043
I will die for you but i shall never, ever live for you. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001444223
We [entrepreneurs] required that you leave us free to function
free to think and work as we choose ...
free to earn our own profits and make our own fortunes ... Such was the price we asked, which you chose to reject as too high. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001446559
But I don't think of you.

(Howard Roark) -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001446970
Wearily distasteful resignation: it seemed easier to attend the wedding than to bother explaining her absence afterwards. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001449312
In a fully free society, taxation-or, to be exact, payment for governmental services-would be voluntary. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001450383
Religion bred selfishness; because, he stated, religion overemphasized the importance of the individual spirit; religion preached nothing but a single concern - the salvation of one's own soul. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001451379
The evaluation of an action as 'practical,' depends on what it is that one wishes to practice. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001451380
On't worry about the goddamn bastards. The two words sounded shockingly violent, because his face and voice remained calm. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001451381
When he did not smile, his face looked inanimate, only his eyes remained alive, active with a cold, brilliant clarity of perception. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001451382
If you believe that you have the right to force me - use your guns openly. I will not help you to disguise the nature of your action. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001451383
He had never known fear because, against any disaster, he had held the omnipotent cure of being able to act. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001451384
There was no guilt in his face, no doubt, nothing but the calm of an inviolate self-confidence. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001451385
He stood looking at her as if it took all of his effort to keep his eyes directed at her face, to keep seeing her, to endure the sight. "What do you want?" he asked. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001451804
He was seeing a long line of men stretched through the centuries from Plato onward, whose heir and final product was an incompetent little professor with the appearance of a gigolo and the soul of a thug. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001453837
The nation which once held the creed that greatness is achieved by production, is now told that it is achieved by squalor. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001454017
Keating stood still, because he understood for the first time what it was that artists spoke about when they spoke of beauty. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001455371
He was sixty years old; his backbone had been as straight as his gun; his spirit-as straight as his backbone. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001455622
A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race - and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001459415
Maybe you can't afford to give them a raise, but how can they afford to live when the cost of living has shot sky-high? They've got to eat, don't they? -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001459835
We are nothing. Mankind is all. By the grace of our brothers are we allowed our lives. We exist through, by and for our brothers who are the State. Amen. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001461299
A vague soil spread and ready from which friendships would spring. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001461807
He was seeing the final contradiction, the grotesque absurdity at the end of the irrationalists' game -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001462026
To a life; which is reason unto itself. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001462451
Honest people are never touchy about the matter of being trusted. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001463572
There were moments when she felt a sudden, violent longing for him, but it was only impatience, not pain. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001463573
It seemed natural; natural to the moment's peculiar reality that was sharply clear, but cut off from everything, immediate, but disconnected, like a bright island in a wall of fog, the heightened, unquestioning reality one feels when one is drunk. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001463574
I never found beauty in longing for the impossible and never found the possible to be beyond my reach. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001463575
She liked his face - its lines were tight and firm, it did not have that look of loose muscles evading the responsibility of a shape, which she had learned to expect in people's faces. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001463576
I'm not asking you to do your best. I'm asking you to do your job. -Dagny Taggart -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001463577
They stopped and looked at each other. She knew, only when he did it, that she had known he would. He seized her, she felt her lips in his mouth, felt her arms grasping him in violent answer ... -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001463578
When everybody agrees," Taggart's voice suddenly went shrill, "when people are unanimous, how does one man dare to dissent? By what right? That's what I want to know - by what right? -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001463580
They seemed to want her approval, without having to know whether she approved or not. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001463581
As she looked at him, her dark gray eyes went slowly from astonishment to stillness, then to a strange expression that resembled a look of weariness, except that it seemed to reflect much more than the endurance of this one moment. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001463582
She stopped for the duration of a glance around her, as if to recapture the place, but there was no recognition of persons in her eyes, the glance merely swept through the room, as if making a swift inventory of physical objects. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001463584
Dagny listened to the Fourth Concerto, her head thrown back, her eyes closed. She lay half-stretched across the corner of a couch, her body relaxed and still; but tension stressed the shape of her mouth on her motionless face, a sensual shape drawn in lines of longing. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001463585
She lay on her back, looking up at the sky, feeling no desire to move or think or know that there was any time beyond this moment. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001463586
She heard the words; she understood the meaning; she was unable to make it real - to grant the respect of anger, concern, opposition to a nightmare piece of insanity that rested on nothing but people's willingness to pretend to believe that it was sane. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001463587
There was an air of luxury about the room, but it was the luxury of expert simplicity. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001463588
She dismissed it with the thought that there were many kinds of work which were offensive, yet necessary, such as cleaning sewers; somebody had to do it, and Jim seemed to like it. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001463589
- mind, Miss Taggart? My mind is not on the market any longer. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001463590
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. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001463591
But why?"
"You goddamn fool, do you think I consider their question debatable? -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001463592
She stood beside him, sagging in his arms, abandoning herself to anything he wished, in open acknowledgment of his power to reduce her to helplessness by the pleasure he had the power to give her. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001463593
She felt an odd, light-hearted indifference, as if she suddenly wanted nothing but the comfort of surrendering to helplessness. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001465525
When personal judgment is inoperative (or forbidden), men's first concern is not how to choose, but how to justify their choice -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001468408
But there was no curiosity in those faces, and no anger, and no mercy. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001470087
Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001471291
Nothing on earth or beyond it is closed to the power of man's reason. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001472903
She found a dark satisfaction in pain - because that pain came from him. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001472904
She seemed to find him suitable as an inconsequential companion for an occasional, inconsequential evening. He thought that she liked him. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001472905
She knew that neither his clothes nor the years stood between her and the living intactness of that memory. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001474256
He liked to observe emotions; they were like red lanterns strung along the dark unknown of another's personality, marking vulnerable points. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001474463
More contemptible than a criminal, is the employer who rejects men for being too good. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001475162
A Conformist is a man who declares, "It's true because others believe it" - but an Individualist is NOT a man who declares, "It's true because I believe it."
An Individual declares, "I believe it because I see in reason that it is true. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001476335
Capitalism was the only system in history where wealth was not acquired by looting, but by production, not by force, but by trade, the only system that stood for man's right to his own mind, to his work, to his life, to his happiness, to himself. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001476762
The man who entered was a stranger. He was young, tall, and something about him suggested violence, though she could not say what it was, because the first trait one grasped about him was a quality of self-control that seemed almost arrogant. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001479110
We're the only ones who know how little value or meaning there is in material objects as such, because we're the ones who create their value and meaning. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001480710
He belonged in the countryside, she thought - he belonged everywhere - he was a man who belonged on earth - and then she thought of the words which were more exact: he was a man to whom the earth belonged, the man at home on earth and in control. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001481583
All the reasons which made the initiation of physical force evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001482199
The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001482973
Aquinas brought an Aristotelian view of reason back into European culture, and lighted the way toward the Renaissance. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001483240
Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equalled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001483575
Some give up at the first touch of pressure; some sell out; some run down by imperceptible degrees and lose their fire, never knowing when or how they lost it. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001484807
An inventor is a man who asks 'Why? -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001488425
Freedom comes from seeing the ignorance of your critics and discovering the emptiness of their virtue. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001491338
Place nothing above the verdict of your own mind. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001492467
It goes only down to a certain point and then it stops. As long as there is that untouched point, it's not really pain. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001493947
All work is an act of creating and comes from the same source: from an inviolate capacity to see through one's own eyes - which means: the capacity to perform a rational identification -which means: the capacity to see, to connect and to make what had not been seen, connected and made before. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001495117
Capitalism is based on self-interest and self-esteem; it holds integrity and trustworthiness as cardinal virtues and makes them pay off in the marketplace, thus demanding that men survive by means of virtues, not of vices. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001495562
People create their own questions because they are afraid to look straight. All you have to do is look straight and see the road, and when you see it, don't sit looking at it - walk. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001509245
An inventor is a man who asks 'Why?' of the universe and lets nothing stand between the answer and his mind. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001512074
We are nothing mankind is all -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001512148
It's not about who's going to let me; it's about who's going to stop me. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001513232
A 'mixed economy' is a society in the process of committing suicide. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001513765
Humor is not an unconditional virtue; its moral character depends on its object. To laugh at the contemptible, is a virtue; to laugh at the good, is a hideous vice. Too often, humor is used as the camouflage of moral cowardice. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001514263
That time and those people are upon you! -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001515453
Many men in the Homes of the Scholars have had strange new ideas in the past," said Solidarity 8-1164, "but when the majority of their brother Scholars voted against them, they abandoned their ideas, as all men must. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001516855
Mr. Roark, I'm so sorry about - " she hesitated demurely " - about what happened this morning. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001521342
We do not know why, when we think of them, we feel all of a sudden that the earth is good and that it is not a burden to live. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001523670
All public projects are mausoleums, not always in shape, but always in cost. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001524215
It was only in the first few years that she felt herself screaming silently, at times, for a glimpse of human ability, a single glimpse of clean, hard, radiant competence. She had fits of tortured longing for a friend or enemy with a mind better than her own. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001524368
Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001525958
If you see us among scores of women, will you look upon us?
We shall look upon you, Liberty 5-3000, if we see you among all the women of the earth. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001526733
Life consist of motion with purpose -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001528162
The man who despises himself tries to gain self-esteem from sexual adventures - which can't be done, because sex is not the cause, but an effect and an expression of a man's sense of his own value. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001530957
His glance was like a plea, like the cry for help of a man who could never cry. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001530958
There was a time when men were afraid that somebody would reveal some secret of theirs that was unknown to their fellows. Nowadays, they're afraid that somebody will name what everybody knows. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001530959
An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001530960
Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life. Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001530961
What glory can there be in the conquest of a mindless body? -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001531349
Until men learn that of all human symbols, Robin Hood is the most immoral and the most contemptible, there will be no justice on earth and no way for mankind to survive. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001532650
Have you noticed that the imbecile always smiles? Man's first frown is the first touch of God on his forehead. The touch of thought. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001532877
Your fear of death is not a love for life. . . -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001533733
No, you do not have to live; it is your basic act of choice; but if you choose to live, you must live as a man - by the work and the judgment of your mind. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001535562
A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001537336
All work is an act of philosophy. And when men will learn to consider productive work - and that which is its source - as the standard of their moral values, they will reach that state of perfection which is the birthright they lost.. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001537337
Competition is a by-product of productive work, not its goal. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001539873
And no power on earth could tell whether their blankly indifferent eyes were shutters protecting hidden treasures at the bottom of shafts no longer to be mined, or were merely gaping holes of the parasite's emptiness never to be filled. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001540024
Allies never trust each other, but that doesn't spoil their effectiveness. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001541169
Do not make the mistake of the ignorant who think that an individualist is a man who says: "I'll do as I please at everybody else's expense." An individualist is a man who recognizes the inalienable individual rights of man - his own and those of others. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001541210
An Individualist is a man who lives for his own sake and by his own mind; he neither sacrifices himself to others nor sacrifices others to himself; he deals with men as a trader - not as a looter; as a producer - not as a Attila. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001541296
A desire presupposes the possibility of action to achieve it; action presupposes a goal that is worth achieving. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001543032
And because she worshipped joy, Kira seldom laughed and did not go to see comedies in theaters. And because she felt a profound rebellion against the weighty, the tragic, the solemn, Kira had a solemn reverence for those songs of defiant gaiety. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001546928
No man can use his brain to think for another. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001548698
Because he knew that he was coming for the last time. That morning he had been expelled from the Architectural School of the Stanton Institute of Technology. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001548891
We never had to take any of it seriously, did we?' she whispered. 'No, we never had to. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001551478
We do not tell - we show. We do not claim - we prove. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001552550
Even if smog were a risk to human life, we must remember that life in nature, without technology, is wholesale death. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001552962
The men who attempt to survive, not by means of reason, but by means of force, are attempting to survive by the method of animals. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001554228
The concept of free competition enforced by law is a grotesque contradiction in terms. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001554800
The question of whether one alleges the Superiority or Inferiority of any given race is irrelevant; racism has only one psychological root: the racist's sense of his own Inferiority. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001557016
I am unwilling to be wholly good - and please don't regard me as wholly evil! -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001559051
Dagny and Fransisco d'Anconia?" she said, smiling ruefully, in answer to the curiosity of her friends. "Oh no, it's not a romance. It's an international industrial cartel of some kind. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001559278
Dont switch the blame to her, that's the oldest trick of all cowards -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001559383
I covet no man's soul, nor is my soul theirs to covet. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001560075
Of metal, if one combined a truss with an arch, if one built diagonal -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001560432
Every period ruled by mystics was an era of stagnation and want, when most men were on strike against existence, -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001561338
If a man wants love he should correct his weaknesses, or his flaws, and he may deserve it. But he cannot expect the unearned, either in love or in money; either in matter or in spirit. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001562555
The pursuit of truth is not important. The pursuit of that truth is important which helps you in reaching your goal that is provided you have one. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001564491
We will build a society dedicated to higher ideals, and we will replace the aristocracy of money by - " " - the aristocracy of pull," said a voice beyond the group. They whirled around. The man who stood facing them was Francisco d'Anconia. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001567102
The mark of an honest man ... is that he means what he says and knows what he means. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001568140
To deal with men by force is as impractical as to deal with nature by persuasion. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001571658
To achieve, you need thought. You have to know what you are doing and that's real power. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001572347
Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001572973
A viler evil than to murder a man, is to sell him suicide as an act of virtue. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001577159
Its the critic's job to interpret the artist, even to the artist himself. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001578098
Worry is a waste of emotional reserve". -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001579676
There is only one power that determines the course of history, just as it determines the course of every individual life: the power of man's rational faculty - the power of ideas. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001583966
If a man dies fighting for his own freedom, it is not a sacrifice: he is not willing to live as a slave; but it is a sacrifice to the kind of man who's willing. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001587843
He did not think of the ten years: What remained of them tonight was only a feeling which he could not name, except that it was quiet and solemn. The feeling was a sum, and he did not have to count again the parts that had gone to make it. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001588092
Errors of knowledge are not breaches of morality; no proper moral code can demand infallibility or omniscience. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001589284
One puts oneself above all and crushes everything in one's way to get the best for oneself. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001590173
Whenever a man denounces the mind, it is because his goal is of a nature the mind would not permit him to confess. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001590174
It was that ruthless tone, peculiarly his, which sounded implacable by being simple, devoid of any emotional value, save the quality of respect for facts. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001590177
John Galt is Prometheus who changed his mind. After centuries of being torn by vultures in payment for having brought to men the fire of the gods, he broke his chains - and he withdrew his fire - until the day when men withdraw their vultures. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001590178
I'll warn you now that there is one word which is forbidden in this valley: the word 'give. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001590180
Our first rule here ... is that one must always see for oneself. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001590417
All growth demands destruction. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001590642
We alone, of the thousands who walk this earth, we alone in this hour are doing a work which has no purpose save that we wish to do it. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001591073
To fear to face an issue is to believe that the worst is true. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001591285
And suddenly, for the first time this day, we remembered that we are the damned. We remembered it, and we laughed. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001592156
Everything that isn't permitted by The Law is forbidden. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001593263
She had won the battle against her memories. But one form of torture remained, untouched by the years, the torture of the word why? -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001593485
He stood looking straight at her. Their understanding was too offensively intimate, because they had never said a word to each other. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001596043
It's good to suffer. Dont complain. Bear, bow, accept - and be grateful that God has made you suffer. For this makes you better than the people who are laughing and happy. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001599328
Gathered into the single will of pressure, that a shaft of steel -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001599790
Ever the pleasure of one has to be bought by the pain of the other, there better be no trade at all. A trade by which one gains and the other loses is a fraud. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001599823
When you are asked to love everybody indiscriminately, that is to love people without any standard, to love them regardless of whether they have any value or virtue, you are asked to love nobody. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001600587
But it cannot be done to you without your consent. If you permit it to be done, you you deserve it. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001601947
The trees had protected it from time and weather, and from men who have less pity than time and weather. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001607124
May knowledge come to us! What is this secret our heart has understood and yet will not reveal to us, although it seems to beat as if it were endeavoring to tell it? -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001607954
Never ask people about your work. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001608827
We are born into this world unarmed - our mind is our only weapon. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001609150
Free scientific inquiry? The first adjective is redundant. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001609945
Live a life as a monument to your soul. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001614135
As down the centuries, a few men stand in lonely rectitude that we may look and say, there is a human race behind us. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001614155
The genius must have his freedom and his independence. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001615882
Only if one feels immensely important she had told him, can one feel truly light. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001616978
Married people dont look like they have bedrooms on their minds when they look at each other. In this world, either you're virtuous or you enjoy yourself. Not both ... Not both. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001618107
Lobbying is the activity of attempting to influence legislation by privately influencing the legislators. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001620032
As a re-creation of reality, a work of art has to be representational; its freedom of stylization is limited by the requirement of intelligibility; if it does not present an intelligible subject, it ceases to be art. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001620294
Ever since Kant divorced reason from reality, his intellectual descendants have been diligently widening the breach. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001622077
We all have a sort of vague, glowing picture when we say that, something solemn, big and important. But actually all we know of it is the people we meet in our lifetime. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001625855
The mind is the attribute of man. When man is born, he comes into existence with only one weapon with him
The reasoning mind. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001625856
She knew that she could not have reached this white serenity except as the sum of all the colors, of all the violence she had known. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001627835
I would have to think on a nice clean job. I don't want to think. Not their way. It will have to be their way, no matter where I go. I want a job where I won't have to think. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001628557
If, before undertaking some action, you must obtain the permission of society-you are not free, whether such permission is granted to you or not. Only a slave acts on permission. A permission is not a right. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001629106
I don't think a man can hurt another, not in any important way. Neither hurt him nor help him. I have really nothing to forgive you. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001631555
For my purpose, the non-fiction form of abstract knowledge doesn't interest me; the final, applied form of fiction, of story, does. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001633224
Had stood there silently, watching, without interest or purpose, like a chemical compound on a photographic plate, absorbing visual shapes because they were there to be absorbed, but unable ever to form any estimate of the objects of her vision. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001633530
Then she remembered. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001634828
The basic purpose of art is not to teach, but to show - to hold up to man a concretized image of his nature and his place in the universe. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001635107
We wish to be damned with you, rather than blessed with all our brothers. Do -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001636702
The desire not to be anything is the desire not to be. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001636951
No man can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation , an unrewarded duty or an involuntary servitude on another man.
There can be no such thing as the right to enslave . -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001638132
Indiscriminate tolerance and indiscriminate condemnation are not two opposites: they are two variants of the same evasion. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001639050
What you think you think is an illusion created by your glands, your emotions and, in the last analysis, by the content of your stomach. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001639234
Love is the ultimate form of recognition one grants to superlative values. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001640425
The relief was not in the surrender of responsibility, but in the sight of a man able to assume it. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001643883
In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade that effort. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001644793
He did not know why her presence made him confess things unconfessed in his own mind. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001646331
Man is a being with free will; therefore, each man is potentially good or evil, and it's up to him and only him (through his reasoning mind) to decide which he wants to be. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001646861
If you want to feel good, be rational. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001648476
I understood that centuries of chains and lashes will not kill the spirit of man nor the sense of truth within him. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001649693
Shortest distance between two points is not a straight line - it's a middleman. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001651346
She had a job to do. She did not have time to feel pain; not often. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001651554
If a dedication page were to precede the total of my work, it would read:
To the glory of Man. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001651741
The position of an art in the scale of human knowledge is, perhaps, the most eloquent symptom of the gulf between man's progress in the physical sciences and his stagnation (or, today, his retrogression) in the humanities. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001654050
You'll be one of us, so long as you'll remain in love with your rails and your engines - and they'll lead you back to us, no matter how many times you lose your way. The only man never to be redeemed is the man without passion. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001658642
The theme is the evil of divorcing ideals from life. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001664262
Ideas, in a free society, are not a crime- and neither can they serve as the justification of a crime. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001664713
What is man? He's just a collection of chemicals with delusions of grandeur. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001666563
The degree of a country's freedom is the degree of its prosperity. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001668175
Some day, the world will discover that, without thought, there can be no love. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001668537
What's wealth but the means of expanding one's life? There's two ways one can do it: either by producing more or by producing it faster. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001670434
Victor Hugo: If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001674801
After a while, he went back to his task; he decided that pain was not a valid reason for stopping. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001675738
But a few understand that building is a great symbol we live in our minds, and existence is the attempt to bring that life into physical reality, to state it in gesture and form. For the man who understands this, a house he owns is a statement of his life. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001678796
I'm not interested in helping anybody. I want to make money. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001682199
Do not ever say that the desire to "do good" by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001682224
A man with an immense capacity for the enjoyment of existence. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001683881
her face lay still on the air under his face... -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001684797
I don't build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001685302
An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001685600
To fear to face an issue to believe that the worst is true.
Atlas Shrugged -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001685729
Money is the root of all good. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001686862
It is easier to donate a few thousand to charity and think oneself noble than to base self-respect on personal standards of personal achievement. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001688442
When nothing seems worth the effort - said some stern voice in her mind - it's a screen to hide a wish that's worth too much; what do you want? -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001691802
Each man must live as an end in himself and follow his own rational self-interest. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001693764
Toohey: "Mr. Roark, we're alone here. Why don't you tell me what you think of me? In any words you wish. No one will hear us."
Roark: "But I don't think of you. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001693765
Mr. Roark, we're alone here. Why don't you tell me what you think of me? In any words you wish. No one will hear us." "But I don't think of you." Toohey -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001693840
As man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001694993
Capitalism has been called nationalistic - yet it is the only system that banished ethnicity, and made it possible, in the United States, for men of various, formerly antagonistic nationalities to live together in peace. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001695198
One cannot hate the earth in their name. The earth is beautiful. And it is a background, but not theirs. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001698244
We cannot stop now, even though it frightens us that we are alone in our knowledge. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001698417
Man has the power to act as his own destroyer
and that is the way he has acted through most of history.
Atlast Shrugged -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001698525
The more neurotic and evasive a person is, the shorter the range of his interests. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001702046
They were people who believed that mediocrity was safe. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001703855
Life is a value to be bought and thinking is the only coin noble enough to buy it. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001704202
"Mediocrity" doesn't mean average intelligence, it means an average intelligence that resents and envies its betters. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001704605
I dont work with collectives. I don't consult, i don't co-operate, I don't collaborate. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001705570
It is not death that we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to live. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001705698
do you really think you're so much better than everybody else?' And what do you suppose she answered? 'Yes,' she said, 'I do. I wish I didn't have to.' But actually! -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001706068
Life is the reward of virtue. And happiness is the goal and reward of life. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001707964
When men abandon reason, physical force becomes their only means of dealing with one another and of settling disagreements. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001708724
She stood at the window, her arms spread wide, holding on to each side of the frame, it was as if she held a piece of the city. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001709237
A rational process is a moral process. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001710958
Those who start by saying: 'It is selfish to pursue your own wishes, you must sacrifice them to the wishes of others' - end up by saying: 'It is selfish to uphold your convictions, you must sacrifice them to the convictions of others. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001711598
By what he chooses to present and by how he presents it, any author expresses his fundamental, metaphysical values. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001711700
Those who say theory and practice are two unrelated realms are fools in one and scoundrels in the other. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001712480
There is no affirmation without the one who affirms. in this sense, everything to which you grant your love is yours -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001713791
Man is an end in himself. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001713875
I hold that such a question can never arise except in a society of cannibals. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001715544
Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artists metaphysical value judgments. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001717270
You love people, not for what you do for them or what they do for you. You love them for their values; their virtues. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001719310
He felt safe in the oak tree's presence; it was a thing that nothing could change or threaten; it was his greatest symbol of strength. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001719819
The attack on "selfishness" is an attack on man's self-esteem; to surrender one, is to surrender the other. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001720627
But their eyes were as cold blue glass buttons. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001720853
There is no such thing as duty. If you know that a thing is right, you want to do it. If you don't want to do it - it isn't right. If it's right and you don't want to do it - you don't know what right is and you're not a man. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001722568
They smile too much, but it's an ugly kind of smiling: it's not joy, it's pleading. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001724247
If joy is the aim and the core of existence, she thought, and if that which has the power to give one joy is always guarded as one's deepest secret, then they had seen each other naked in that moment. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001724361
Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be left waiting for us in our graves-or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001724463
You don't love causes. You don't love everybody indiscriminately. You love only those who deserve it. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001727343
Statism needs war; a free country does not. Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by producing. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001727545
A gun is not an argument. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001734784
Their eyes were dark and hard and glowing, with no fear in them, no kindness and no guilt. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001735039
To be able to say "I love you", one has to be able to say "I -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001735146
Virtue is the giving of undeserved. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001735453
Morally, the promise of an impossible "right" to economic security is an infamous attempt to abrogate the concept of rights. It can and does mean only one thing: a promise to enslave the men who produce, for the benefit of those who don't. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001735971
I regret nothing. There have been things I missed, but I ask no questions, because I have loved it, such as it has been, even the moments of emptiness, even the unanswered-and that I loved it, that is the unanswered in my life. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001737367
indifference toward a world which should have been ours was the hardest thing to attain. I -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001739576
To say "I love you" one must first be able to say the "I -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001740545
The man who discovers new knowledge is the permanent benefactor of humanity. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001740882
And that night we knew that to hold the body of women in our arms in neither ugly nor shameful, but the one ecstasy granted to the race of men. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001742659
Capitalism is our only moral system. All other systems take advantage of man's rights and liberties. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001742668
Whatever it was that others sought in life, their right to what they now felt was all the two of them wished to find. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001743560
One of the most destructive anti-concepts in the history of moral philosophy is the term 'duty. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001746994
FCC power rests on ... nonobjective law (which) delivers men's lives, fortunes, careers, ambitions into the arbitrary power of a bureaucrat who can reward or punish at whim. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001750194
She looked at me and the first words that she spoke were: 'I love you. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001750546
Kill reverence and you've killed the hero in man. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001755455
When I die I hope to go to heaven
whatever that is
and I want to be able to afford the price of admission. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001756539
It's so much easier to pass judgment on a man than on an idea. Though how in hell one passes judgment on a man without considering the content of his brain is more than I'll ever understand. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001757340
Words are a lens to focus one's mind. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001759126
Your ego is your strictest judge. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001759617
The cult of moral grayness is a revolt against moral values. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001759730
I would die for you, but i wouldn't live for you. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001761648
Most American men are repressors. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001762031
Im waiting, for what, my kind of people, what kind is that, i can tell my kind of people by their faces, by something in their faces. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001765887
She was incapable of love for any object not of her own choice and she resented anyone's demand for it. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001765888
She turned to him. "Hello, Peter."

"You know Peter Keating of course?" Toohey smiled at her.

"Oh, yes. Peter was in love with me once."

"You're using the wrong tense, Dominique," said Keating. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001767115
To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.
Dominique Francon -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001768308
As long as men are free to speak, a small, rational minority will always prevail over an irrational majority. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001770770
Many words have been granted me, and some are wise, and some are false, but only three are holy: I will it! -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001771083
It was useless to argue, she thought, and to wonder about people who would neither refute an argument nor accept it. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001773425
Do not let your fire go out. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001775491
One must never fail to pronounce moral judgment. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001775680
The government has created a nation of paper criminals. People can be put in jail and lose civil rights and liberties through bureaucratic procedures.The only thing that is keeping you out of jail is government goodwill. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001780850
And man will go on. Man, not men. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001782286
Did it ever occur to you," asked Kira, "that I may be here for the very unusual, unnatural reason of wanting to learn a work I like only because I like it? -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001784410
The sky is like a black sieve pierced by silver drops that tremble, ready to burst through. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001787199
We do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and we do not live in chronic dread of disaster. We do not expect disaster until we have specific reason to expect it - and -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001788294
We strive to be like all our brother men, for all men must be alike. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001788383
He knew that the dread in these men's minds was not of the fact, but of his naming it - as if the fact had not existed, but his words held the power to make it exist. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001792030
Everyone has the right to make his own decisions, but none has the right to force his decision on others. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001794338
It takes two to make every great career: the man who is great, and the man-almost rarer-who is great enough to see greatness and say so. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001794749
It was a hymn with the force of a march, a march with the majesty of a hymn. It was the song of soldiers bearing sacred banners and of priests carrying swords. It was an anthem to the sanctity of strength. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001795070
It's such a waste to be subtle and vicious with people who don't even know that you're being subtle and vicious -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001796434
Morality pertains only to the sphere of man's free will - only to those actions which are open to his choice. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001798123
A free economy cannot exist without competition. Therefore, men must be forced to compete. Therefore, we must control men in order to force them to be free. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001800431
A rational man is guided by his thinking - by a process of Reason - not by his feelings and desires. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001802710
There are no evil thoughts, Mr. Rearden," Francisco said softly, "except one: the refusal to think. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001803340
And we know well that there is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001804662
The Council of Scholars has said that we all know the things which exist and therefore the things which are not known by all do not exist. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001806644
Through the years the thought of suicide had occurred to him, not as an intention, but as one of the many possibilities among the chances of life. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001808727
Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001809484
There has never been a philosophy, a theory or a doctrine, that attacked (or 'limited') reason, which did not preach submission to the power of some authority. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001809499
An individualist is a man who says: 'I will not run anyone's life - nor let anyone run mine. I will not rule or be ruled. I will not be a master nor a slave. I will not sacrifice myself to anyone - nor sacrifice anyone to myself.' -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001810626
Wasn't it evil to wish without moving- or to move without aim? -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001813359
He had to say; words were a lens to focus one's mind, and he could not use words for anything else tonight. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001813638
Do not expect consistency. Everything is a contradiction of everything else. Nothing exists but contradictions. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001814009
She knew that even pain can be confessed, but to confess happiness is to stand naked, delivered to the witness ... -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001815365
The man who produces while others dispose of his product is a slave. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001817554
It has been a day of wonder, this, our first day in the forest. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001820118
All life is a purposeful struggle, and your only choice is the choice of a goal. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001823404
But if I were given a choice - of all centuries - I'd select last the curse of being born in this one. And perhaps, if I weren't curious, I'd choose never to be born at all. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001824948
Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001826494
A reader has to be concerned only with the end result; unless he chooses to analyze it, he does not have to know by what means that result was achieved-but it is my job to know. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001828643
There are things that must be destroyed
or they'll destroy us. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001830298
No principle ever filled anybody's milk bottle -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001830574
That which exists possesses identity; he could keep it out of existence by refusing to identify it. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001830607
What I've got to offer you is your life.'
'It's not yours to offer ... -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001831178
It is true that the welfare-statists are not socialists, that they never advocated or intended the socialization of private property, that they want to 'preserve' private property-with government control of its use and disposal. But that is the fundamental characteristic of fascism. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001831231
The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001831285
He was a man who had never accepted the creed that others had the right to stop him. He set his goal and moved toward it ... -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001831645
Kant is the most evil man in mankind's history. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001831795
No, Jim,' she said quietly, 'I guess I've never felt anything at all. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001834134
The creed of sacrifice is a morality for the immoral. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001834284
I don't approve of religion. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001834611
It was the joy of admiration and of one's own ability, growing together. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001834826
Racism negates two aspects of man's life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001835180
There is really only one proper function: the protection of individual rights. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001835571
I am not the means to any end others may wish to accomplish. I am not a tool for their use. I am not a servant of their needs. I am not a bandage for their wounds, I am not a sacrifice on their altars. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001836683
Do not let the hero in your soul perish... -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001836692
Man's character is the product of his premises. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001839613
I don't wish to be the symbol of anything. I'm only myself. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001840591
Get the hell out of my way! -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001841829
One moves step by step and one must keep moving. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001843325
There are two things we must get rid of early in life: a feeling of personal superiority and an exaggerated reverence for the sexual act. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001843652
There is nothing to take a man's freedom away from him, save other men (pg. 101). -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001843775
When a man attempts to deal with me by force, I answer him, by force. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001844227
To demand 'sense' is the hallmark of nonsense. Nature does not make sense. Nothing makes sense. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001844503
The right to life means that a man has the right to support his life by his own work (on any economic level, as high as his ability will carry him); it does not mean that others must provide him with the necessities of life. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001844719
She did not know what it was about him that had always made her want to see him broken. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001848240
God ... a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001849876
I've wanted to want it. I should think it would be exciting to become a dissolute woman. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001850144
I'll be afraid only on a day that will never come. The day when I give up. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001850279
The only justification of private property," said Orren Boyle, "is public service. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001851741
The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001852913
had a large personal following -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001853306
Let's be gods. Let's be ugly. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001853588
Never Consume more than you produce. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001855360
A story is an end in itself. It is not written to teach, sell, explain or destroy anything. It is not written even to entertain. It is written as a man is born - an organic whole, dictated only by its own laws and its own necessity - an end in itself, not a means to an end. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001857212
The act of thinking is man's primary act of choice. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001858951
I told them that the form of a building must follow its function. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001862563
You're completely natural only when you're one inch from bursting into pieces. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001862624
I think it's a sin to sit down and let your life go without making a try for it. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001863715
I am a man who does not exist for others. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001864216
Economics departments are dominated by Marxism, which is taken straight or on the rocks, in the form of Keynesianism. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001865098
Through all the darkness, through all the shame of which men are capable, the spirit of man will remain alive on this earth. It may sleep, but it will awaken. It may wear chains, but it will break through. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001865559
The best is a matter of standards -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001866280
Every man is free to rise as far as he's able or willing, but the degree to which he thinks determines the degree to which he'll rise. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001866691
She said 'no' to the words he spoke, and 'yes' to the voice that spoke them. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001867313
Consider the reasons which make us certain that we are right, but not the fact that we are certain. If you are not convinced, ignore our certainty. Don't be tempted to substitute our judgment for your own. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001867619
Capitalism and altruism are incompatible; they are philosophical opposites; they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001868142
Patience is always rewarded and romance is always round the corner! -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001868281
I breathe for my own necessity, for the fuel of my body, for my survival ... I've given you, not my sacrifice or my pity, but my ego and my naked need -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001869716
Integrity is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your consciousness, just as honesty is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake existence. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001871316
I loathe your ideals because I know no worse injustice than the giving of the undeserved. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001872282
Great men can't be ruled. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001874378
He realized that he was thinking of his past, as if certain days of it were spread before him, demanding to be seen again. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001874539
Don't consider our interests or desires. You have no duty to anyone but yourself. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001874749
He had to choke the knowledge. He had to kill the vision. He had to obey and draw the lines as instructed. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001875754
His convictions to the wishes of others, be it the whole -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001875798
The action required to sustain human life is primarily intellectual; everything man needs has to be discovered by his mind and produced by his effort. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001875912
I've always been short on time in my life, never on what to use it for. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001876017
Do you know how much alike we are? -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001876590
If this is what has beaten us, he thought, the guilt is ours. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001876852
Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001877037
There is no conceivable law by which a man can be forced to work on any terms except those he chooses to set. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001877328
You don't build for the way people live, but for the way they should live. I don't write about people as they are, but as they could be and should be. -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Quotes : pic 001877961
Any work is creative work if done by a thinking mind. -- Ayn Rand