Quotes from Ayn Rand

So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate—do you hear me? no man may start—the use of physical force against others.

Today, when a concerted effort is made to obliterate this point, it cannot be repeated too often that the Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals -- that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government -- that it is not a charter _for_ government power, but a charter of the citizen's protection _against_ the government.

My hands . . . My spirit . . . My sky . . . My forest . . . This earth of mine . . .

Whatever road I take, the guiding star is within me; the guiding star and the loadstone which point the way. They point in but one direction. They point to me.

Everything bad comes from the mind, because the mind asks too many questions. It is blessed to believe, not to understand.

His motive in the relationship seemed to resemble the need of an anemic person who receives a kind of living transfusion from the mere sight of a savagely overabundant vitality.

That was the real sentence imposed upon him, he thought - to discover what idea, what simple idea available to the simplest man, had made mankind accept the doctrines that led it to self-destruction.

It is against the sin of forgiveness that I wanted to warn you.

I've wanted to want it. I should think it would be exciting to become a dissolute woman.

The writer who develops a beautiful style, but has nothing to say, represents a kind of arrested esthetic development; he is like a pianist who acquires a brilliant technique by playing finger-exercises, but never gives a concert.

That man, the unsubmissive and first, stands in the opening chapter of every legend mankind has recorded about its beginning. Prometheus was chained to a rock and torn by vultures—because he had stolen the fire of the gods. Adam was condemned to suffer—because he had eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Whatever the legend, somewhere in the shadows of its memory mankind knew that its glory began with one and that that one paid for his courage.

The word We is as lime poured over men, which sets and hardens to stone, and crushes all beneath it, and that which is white and that which is black are lost equally in the grey of it. It is the word by which the depraved steal the virtue of the good, by which the weak steal the might of the strong, by which the fools steal the wisdom of the sages

There are two aspects of man's existence which are the special province and expression of his sense of life: love and art.

We are one in all and all in one.      There are no men but only the great WE,      One, indivisible and forever.—

The sky is a soggy purple.

Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned

I am a man. This miracle of me is mine to own and keep, and mine to guard, and mine to use, and mine to kneel before!

It is not proper for man's life to be a circle, she thought, or a string of circles dropping off like zeros behind him—man's life must be a straight line of motion from goal to farther goal, each leading to the next and to a single growing sum.

Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer—and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.

Man has the power to act as his own destroyer--and that is the way he has acted through most of history." --Atlast Shrugged

When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind - and it's roper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression.

Any human being who accepts the help of another, knows that good will is the giver's only motive and that good will is the payment he owes in return.

Get the hell out of my way! Said by John Galt as the leaders of the country tried to make him become their dictator.

The egotist in the absolute sense is not the man who sacrifices others. He is the man who stands above the need of using others in any manner. He does not function through them. He is not concerned with them in any primary matter. Not in his aim, not in his motive, not in his thinking, not in his desires, not in the source of his energy. He does not exist for any other man—and he asks no other man to exist for him.