Quotes from Ayn Rand

She found a dark satisfaction in pain—because that pain came from him.

Francisco, what's the most depraved type of human being?" "The man without a purpose.

To be free, a man must be free from his brothers. That is freedom. That and nothing else.

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...

Happiness? But that is so middle-class. What is happiness? There are so many things in life so much more important than happiness.

That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call 'free will' is your mind's freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character.

Charity must be voluntary.

From the first extortion he had accepted, from the first directive he had obeyed, he had given them cause to believe that reality was a thing to be cheated, that one could demand the irrational and someone somehow would provide it.

And she thought, with a vicious thrill, of what these people would do if they read her mind in this moment; if they knew that she was thinking of a man in a quarry, thinking of his body with a sharp intimacy as one does not think of another's body but only of one's own. She smiled; the cold purity of her face prevented them from seeing the nature of that smile.

For my purpose, the non-fiction form of abstract knowledge doesn't interest me; the final, applied form of fiction, of story, does.

When the train stopped, when she got off and heard the concrete of the platform under her heels, she felt light, lifted, impelled to action. She started off, walking fast, as if the speed of her steps could give form to the things she felt.

I have, let's say, sixty years to live. Most of that time will be spent working. I've chosen the work I want to do. If I find no joy in it, then I'm only condemning myself to sixty years of torture. And I can find the joy only if I do my work in the best way possible to me. But the best is a matter of standards—and I set my own standards. I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition. I may, perhaps, stand at the beginning of one.

But don't I have any freedom of speech?" "In your own house. Not in mine." "Don't I have a right to my own ideas?" "At your own expense. Not at mine." "Don't you tolerate any differences of opinion?" "Not when I'm paying the bills.

When all the decent pleasures are forbidden, there's always ways to get the rotten ones. You don't break into grocery stores after dark and you don't pick your fellow's pockets to buy classical symphonies or fishing tackle, but if it's to get stinking drunk and forget you do.

You'll come back, because yours is an error of knowledge, not a moral failure, not an act of surrender to evil, but only the last act of being victim to your own virtue. We'll wait for you and when you come back, you will have discovered that there need never be any conflict among your desires, nor so tragic a clash of values as the one you've borne so well.

This miracle of me is mine to own and keep, and mine to guard, and mine to use, and mine to kneel before!

Nothing on earth or beyond it is closed to the power of man's reason.

To say 'I love you' one must first be able to say the 'I'.

Who pays for the orgy?

The only pride of her workday was not that it had been lived, but that it had been survived. It was wrong, she thought, it was viciously wrong that one should ever be forced to say that about any hour of one's life.

So long as road lies before us, and what care we if we must travel it alone!

Yet no penny of his wealth had been obtained by force or fraud; he was guilty of nothing, except that he earned his own fortune and never forgot that it was his.

it was not a silence of resentment; it was the silence of an understanding too delicate to limit by words.

You can't have your cake and let your neighbour eat it too.