Quotes from Ayn Rand

All public projects are mausoleums, not always in shape, but always in cost.

To me there's only one form of human depravity-the man without a purpose.

The victims are the ones who made injustice possible.

A political battle is merely a skirmish fought with muskets; a philosophical battle is a nuclear war.

As down the centuries, a few men stand in lonely rectitude that we may look and say, there is a human race behind us.

He felt something dark and leering in the manner with which people spoke of Prescott's genius; as if they were not doing homage to Prescott, but spitting upon genius. For once, Keating could not follow people; it was too clear, even to him, that public favor had ceased being a recognition of merit, that it had become almost a brand of shame.

She had set out to break him, as if, unable to equal his value, she could surpass it by destroying it, as if the measure of his greatness would thus become the measure of hers, as if…the vandal who smashed a statue were greater than the artist who made it, as if the murderer who killed a child were greater than the mother who had given it birth.

Oh, but I am quite resigned to taking second place in the shadow of my husband. I am humbly aware that the wife of a great man has to be contented with reflected glory - don't you think so Miss Taggart? No, said Dagny, I don't.

I think it's a worthy undertaking--to provide a decent apartment for a man who earns fifteen dollars a week. But not at the expense of other men. Not if it raises the taxes, raises all the other rents and makes the man who earns forty live in a rat hole.

Since there is no such entity as 'the public,' since the public is merely a number of individuals, any claimed or implied conflict of 'the public interest' with private intersts means that the interests of some men are to be sacrificed to the interest and wishes of others.

There's no way to make the irrational work.

But if I were given a choice - of all centuries - I'd select last the curse of being born in this one. And perhaps, if I weren't curious, I'd choose never to be born at all.

Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values. If a man values productive work, his happiness is the measure of his success in the service of his life.

Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality. But existence exists; reality is not to be wiped out, it will merely wipe out the wiper. By refusing to say 'It is,' you are refusing to say 'I am.' By suspending your judgment, you are negating your person. When a man declares: 'Who am I to know?'- he is declaring: 'Who am I to live?

If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him.

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

Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it. "Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another—their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.

No gift is worth a damn, unless its the most precious thing you've got.

John Galt spent years looking for it. He crossed oceans, and he crossed deserts, and he went down into forgotten mines, miles under the earth. But he found it on the top of a mountain. It took him ten years to climb that mountain. It broke every bone in his body, it tore the skin off his hands, it made him lose his home, his name, his love. But he climbed it. He found the fountain of youth, which he wanted to bring down to men.Only he never came back.

If you want my advice, Peter," he said at last, "you've made a mistake already. By asking me. By asking anyone. Never ask people. Not about your work. Don't you know what you want? How can you stand it, not to know?

I'm not asking you to do your best. I'm asking you to do your job. -Dagny Taggart

There was an air of luxury about the room, but it was the luxury of expert simplicity.

When unlimited and unrestricted by individual rights a government is men's deadliest enemy.

Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind, and a step that travels unlimited roads