Quotes from Ayn Rand

Victor Hugo: "If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sacrifice does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious

He has once built his fortune, starting out with empty hands; now he had to rebuild his life, starting out with an empty spirit

Whenever anyone accuses some person of being 'unfeeling,' he means that that person is just. He means that that person has no causeless emotions and will not grant him a feeling which he does not deserve. He means that .'to feel' is to go against reason, against moral values, against reality.

It is my will which chooses, and the choice of my will is the only edict I must respect.

The sacred word: EGO

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...

Only if one feels immensely important she had told him, can one feel truly light.

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.

Don't think of them now. Never think of pain or danger or enemies a moment longer than is necessary to fight them.

Whatever it was, he thought, whatever the strain and the agony, they were worth it, because they had made him reach this day

In times like these, when their fat little comforts are threatened, you may be sure that science is the first thing men will sacrifice.

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.

When men reject reason, they have no means left for dealing with one another — except brute, physical force.

whose steps were a restless substitute for flight.

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.

Every form of happiness is private. Our greatest moments are personal, self-motivated, not to be touched. The things which are sacred or precious to us are the things we withdraw from promiscuous sharing.

her face lay still on the air under his face...

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.