Quotes from Ayn Rand

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.

No speech is ever considered, but only the speaker. It's so much easier to pass judgement on a man than on an idea.

Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

You have been called selfish for the courage of acting on your own judgement and bearing sole responsibility for your own life. You have been called arrogant for your independent mind. You have been called cruel for your unyielding integrity. You have been calle anti social for the vision that made you venture upon undiscovered roads.

When I die I hope to go to heaven--whatever that is--and I want to be able to afford the price of admission.

Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.

There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.

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

Worry is a waste of emotional reserve.

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.

For the first time since her return, she felt pain, a violent pain, but it made her feel alive, because it was worth feeling.

If one doesn't respect oneself one can have neither love nor respect for others.

The worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt.

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...

I know not if this earth on which I stand is the core of the universe or if it is but a speck of dust lost in eternity. I know not and I care not. For I know what happiness is possible to me on earth. And my happiness needs no higher aim to vindicate it. My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose.

The secrets of this earth are not for all men to see, but only for those who will seek them (pg. 52).

A quest for self-respect is proof of its lack

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.

And what, incidentally, do you think integrity is? The ability not to pick a watch out of your neighbor's pocket? No, it's not as easy as that. If that were all, I'd say ninety-five percent of humanity were honest, upright men. Only, as you can see, they aren't. Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea.

We are all brothers under the skin - and I, for one, would be willing to skin humanity to prove it.

A rational man never distorts or corrupts his own standards and judgment in order to appeal to the irrationality, stupidity, or dishonesty of others.

There are no evil thoughts except one; the refusal to think.

I came here to say that 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 wished to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others. - Howard Roark

Because, you see, God—whatever anyone chooses to call God—is one's highest conception of the highest possible. And whoever places his highest conception above his own possibility thinks very little of himself and his life. 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. To imagine a heaven and then not to dream of it, but to demand it.