Quotes from Ayn Rand

What does all this do to the best minds among the students? Most of them endure their college years with the teeth-clenched determination of serving out a jail sentence.

You don't have to worry about the intellectuals, Wesley. Just put a few of them on the government payroll and send them out to preach precisely the sort of thing Mr. Kinnan mentioned: that the blame rests on the victims. Give them moderately comfortable salaries and extremely loud titles—and they'll forget their copyrights and do a better job for you than whole squads of enforcement officers.

she could not pay him the tribute of hostility. He knew that he disliked her violently. But he watched the shape of her mouth, the movements of her lips framing words; he watched the way she crossed her legs, a gesture smooth and exact, like an expensive instrument being folded; and he could not escape the feeling of incredulous admiration he had experienced when he had seen her for the first time.

There is no such thing as 'the public interest' except as the sum of the interests of individual men. And the basic, common interest of all men—all rational men—is freedom. Freedom is the first requirement of 'the public interest'—not what men do when they are free, but that they are free. All their achievements rest on that foundation—and cannot exist without it.

If you have not yet heard it, my dear old-fashioned friends, it has now been proved that the rational is the insane.

don't you see that the essential error is the same? Any refusal to recognize reality, for any reason whatever, has disastrous consequences. There are no evil thoughts except one: the refusal to think.

Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.

they seemed wounded by anything he said, it was not a matter of his words or actions, it was almost . . . almost as if they were wounded by the mere fact of his being.

La utopía de la codicia

sustituiremos la aristocracia del dinero por... —... la aristocracia del pillaje

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.

Some day, the world will discover that, without thought, there can be no love.

Love is our response to our highest values. Love is self-enjoyment. The noblest love is born out of admiration of another's values.

The world you desire can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.

She had learned, in the slums of her childhood, that honest people were never touchy about the matter of being trusted.

Don't think. Believe. Trust your heart, not your brain. Don't think. Feel. Believe.

It was the greatest sensation of existence: not to trust but to know.

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.

Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?

You love only those who deserve it.

You love people, not for what you do for them or what they do for you. You love them for their values; their virtues.

Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by fraud.

You don't love causes. You don't love everybody indiscriminately. You love only those who deserve it.

Love is our response to our highest values.