Quotes from Ayn Rand

You never wanted me to be real. You never wanted anyone to be. But you didn't want me to show it. You wanted an act to help your act...

the Council of Schools has said that there are no mysteries.

I can do nothing halfway. Those who can, have a fissure somewhere inside. Most people have many. They lie to themselves—not to know that. I've never lied to myself.

Any man, who's afraid of hiring the best ability he can find, is a cheat who's in a business where he doesn't belong. To me-the foulest man on earth, more contemptible than a criminal, is the employer who rejects men for being too good. That's what I've always thought and- say, what are you laughing at?

A thinking child cannot conform. Thought does not bow to authority.

Do you know what she did today? He leaned confidentially across the table, pointing at the dishes in the sink. She went to the market and left all the breakfast dishes there and said she'd do them later. I know what she wanted. She expected me to do them. Well, I'll fool her. I'll leave them just where they are.

Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future.

The world is ours, whenever we choose to claim it, by virtue and grace of the fact that ours is the Morality of Life.

The position of an art in the scale of human knowledge is, perhaps, the most eloquent symptom of the gulf between man's progress in the physical sciences and his stagnation (or, today, his retrogression) in the humanities.

The statue was of a young man with a tall, gaunt body and an angular face. He held his head as if he faced a challenge and found joy in his capacity to meet it.

All I know is, unselfishness is the only moral principle, said Jessica Pratt, the noblest principle and a sacred duty and much more important than freedom. Unselfishness is the only way to happiness. I would have everybody who refused to be unselfish shot. To put them out of their misery. They can't be happy anyway.

If everybody were compelled to have the proper kind of education, we'd have a better world. If we force people to do good, they will be free to be happy.

HOWARD ROARK LAUGHED. He stood naked at the edge of a cliff. The lake lay far below him. A frozen explosion of granite burst in flight to the sky over motionless water. The water seemed immovable, the stone flowing. The stone had the stillness of one brief moment in battle when thrust meets thrust and the currents are held in a pause more dynamic than motion. The stone glowed, wet with sunrays.

I can accept anything, except what seems to be the easiest for most people: the halfway, the almost, the just-about, the in-between.

If ever the pleasure of one has to be bought by the pain of the other, there better be no trade at all. A trade by which one gains and the other loses is a fraud.

She heard the words; she understood the meaning; she was unable to make it real—to grant the respect of anger, concern, opposition to a nightmare piece of insanity that rested on nothing but people's willingness to pretend to believe that it was sane.

A process of reason is a process of constant choice in answer to the question: True or False? - Right or Wrong?

she had always looked for sparks of competence, like a diamond prospector in an unpromising wasteland.

Dagny, why is it that most women would never admit that, but you do?" "Because they're never sure that they ought to be wanted. I am." "I do admire self-confidence." "Self-confidence was only one part of what I said, Hank." "What's the whole?" "Confidence of my value—and yours.

The unrecognized genius-that's one old story. Have you ever thought of a much worse one-the genius recognized too well?

When one makes enemies one knows that one's dangerous where it's necessary to be dangerous.

She saw both serenity and suffering in the calm of his face, an expression like a smile of pain, though he was not smiling...He did not look like a man bearing torture now, but like a man who sees that which makes the torture worth bearing.

He was seeing the final contradiction, the grotesque absurdity at the end of the irrationalists' game

Are you saying," he asked slowly, "that I rose in your estimation when you found that I wanted you?" "Of course." "That's not the reaction of most people to being wanted." "It isn't." "Most people feel that they rise in their own eyes, if others want them." "I feel that others live up to me, if they want me....