Quotes from Ayn Rand

Don't set out to raze all shrines, you'll frighten men. enshrine mediocrity-and the shrines are razed.

You love your work. God help you, you love it! And thats the curse. That's the brand on your forehead for all of them to see. You love it and they know it, and they know they have you. Do you ever look at the people in the street? Aren't you afraid of them? I am. They move past you and they wear hats and they carry bundles. But that's not the substance of them. The substance of them is hatred for any man who loves his work. That's the only kind they fear. I don't know why

It's not a question of who will allow me to do it, it's a question of who will stop me.

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.

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

If any part of your uncertainty is a conflict between your heart and your mind—follow your mind.

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.

There were sharp little blows in the music, and waves of quick, fine notes that burst and rolled like the thin, clear ringing of broken glass. There were slow notes, as if the cords of the violins trembled in hesitation, tense with the fullness of sound, taking a few measured steps before the leap into the explosion of laughter.

Their eyes were dark and hard and glowing, with no fear in them, no kindness and no guilt.

There's no such thing as a lousy job-only lousy men who don't care to do it.

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.

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?

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.

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.

The world you desire can be won. It exists...it is real...it is possible...it's yours.

Do not consider Collectivists as sincere but deluded idealists. The proposal to enslave some men for the sake of others is not an ideal; brutality is not idealistic, no matter what its purpose. Do not ever say that the desire to do good by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.

A spirit, too, needs fuel. It can run dry.

Man is an end in himself.

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.

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.

Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth - the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him.

You can fake virtue for an audience. You can't fake it in your own eyes.

The nation which once held the creed that greatness is achieved by production, is now told that it is achieved by squalor.

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.