Quotes by Ayn Rand
(Page 3 of 6)

It was the joy of admiration and of one's own ability, growing together.

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.

Guilt is a rope that wears thin.

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.

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.

Roark spoke quietly. He was the only man in the room who felt certain of his own words.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

For people who enjoyed their own presence well enough and sought only a place where they would be left free to enjoy it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The audience looked at him. They felt he had no chance. They could drop the nameless resentment, the sense of insecurity which he aroused in most people. And so, for the first time, they could see him as he was: a man totally innocent of fear.

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.

The crowd would have forgiven anything, except a man who could remain normal under the vibrations of its enormous collective sneer.

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.

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.

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?

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!

The great creators-the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors-stood alone against the men of their time.

My dear fellow, who will let you? That's not the point. The point is, who will stop me?

But I don't think of you. -- Howard Roark.

There is nothing wrong in helping other people, if and when they are worthy of the help and you can afford to help them.

Roark smiled, Gail, if this boat were sinking, I'd give my life to save you. Not because it's any kind of duty. Only because I like you, for reasons and standards of my own. I could die for you. But I couldn't and wouldn't live for you.

Believing in fate produces fate. Believing in freedom will create infinite possibilities.

The entire history of science is a progression of exploded fallacies.

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.

The man who produces while others dispose of his product is a slave.

I am interested in politics so that one day I will not have to be interested in politics.

He never felt lonliness except when he was happy.

I am opposed to all forms of control. I am for an absolute, laissez-faire, free, unregulated economy.

The Romanticists predominantly, were enemies of capitalism, which they regarded as a prosaic, materialistic, petty bourgeois system -- never realizing that it was the only system that could make freedom, individuality and the pursuit of values possible in practice.

The worst evil that you can do, psychologically, is to laugh at yourself. That means spitting in your own face.

The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren.

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.

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.

Style is not an end in itself, it is only a means to an end -- the means of telling a story.

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.

Allies never trust each other, but that doesn't spoil their effectiveness.

I owe nothing to my brothers, nor do I gather debts from them. I ask none to live for me, nor do I live for any others. I covet no man's soul, nor is my soul theirs to covet.

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.

I mean the one that claims the pig is the symbol of love for humanity -- the creature that accepts anything. 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.

Don't worry. They're all against me. But I have one advantage: they don't know what they want. I do.

A desire to choose the hardest might be a confession of weakness in itself.

I trust that no one will tell me that men such as I write about don't exist. That this book has been written--and published--is my proof that they do.

Reason functions by integrating perceptual data into concepts.

A man's interests depend on the kind of goals he chooses to pursue, his choice of goals depends on his desires, his desires depend on his values--and, for a rational man, his values depend on the judgment of his mind.

Man is an end in himself.

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.

If parasitism, favoritism, corruption, and greed for the unearned did not exist, a mixed economy would bring them into existence.

Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer -- and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.

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.

To demand 'sense' is the hallmark of nonsense. Nature does not make sense. Nothing makes sense.

A leash is a rope with a noose at both ends.

Defiance, not obedience, is the American's answer to overbearing authority.

No one's happiness but my own is in my power to achieve or to destroy.

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.

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.

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.

But why should you care what people will say? All you have to do is please yourself.

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.

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.

Courage and confidence are practical necessities ... 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.

Ideas are the greatest and most crucially practical power on earth.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live.

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.

And man will go on. Man, not men.

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.

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.

To irrational principles, one cannot be loyal. Ideas that are not derived from reality cannot be consistently practiced in reality.

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.

I love you so much that nothing can matter to me -- not even you...Only my love- not your answer. Not even your indifference.

The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind.

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.

I am. I think. I will.

Every form of happiness is private. Our greatest moments are personal, self-motivated, not to be touched.

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.

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.