Quotes from Ayn Rand

You're the most egotistical and the kindest man I know. And that doesn't make sense." "Maybe the concepts don't make sense. Maybe they don't mean what people have been taught to think they mean.

Don't you know that most people take most things because that's what's given them, and they have no opinion whatever? Do you wish to be guided by what they expect you to think they think or by your own judgment?

She never knew where he was, in what city or on what continent, the day after she had seen him. He always came to her unexpectedly—and she liked it, because it made him a continuous presence in her life, like the ray of a hidden light that could hit her at any moment.

The man who is convinced of his own worthlessness will be drawn to a woman he despises—because she will reflect his own secret self, she will release him from that objective reality in which he is a fraud, she will give him a momentary illusion of his own value and a momentary escape from the moral code that damns him.

She said it quite correctly; there was nothing offensive in the quiet politeness of her voice; but following his high note of enthusiasm, her voice struck a tone that seemed flat and deadly in its indifference—as if the two sounds mingled into an audible counterpoint around the melodic thread of her contempt.

She walked down the hill and she found relief in the unnatural stillness of the earth around her, the stillness of full light without sun, of leaves without motion, of a luminous, waiting silence.

Observe the ugly mess which most men make of their sex lives—and observe the mess of contradictions which they hold as their moral philosophy.

The anti-mind is the anti-life.

What greater wealth is there than to own your own life and to spend it on growing?

Two things were impossible to him: to stand still or to move aimlessly.

The first right on earth is the right of the ego. Man's first duty is to himself. His moral law is never to place his prime goal within the persons of others. His moral obligation is to do what he wishes, provided his wish does not depend primarily upon other men.

he had never known fear because, against any disaster, he had held the omnipotent cure of being able to act.

Such would have been our life, had we not committed our crime which changed all things for us. And it was our curse which drove us to our crime.

My life is the highest of values, too high to give up without a fight.

Actors change, but the course of the tragedy remains the same. A humanitarian who starts with declarations of love for mankind and ends with a sea of blood.

As a re-creation of reality, a work of art has to be representational; its freedom of stylization is limited by the requirement of intelligibility; if it does not present an intelligible subject, it ceases to be art.

He did not think of the ten years: What remained of them tonight was only a feeling which he could not name, except that it was quiet and solemn. The feeling was a sum, and he did not have to count again the parts that had gone to make it.

Rearden sat in his room at the Wayne-Falkland Hotel, fighting an enemy more dangerous than weariness or fear: revulsion against the thought of having to deal with human beings.

he does not achieve through other men nor for other men, he achieves through and for himself alone, then offers it to others.

He was usually disliked, from the first sight of his face, anywhere he went. His face was closed like the door of a safety vault; things locked in safety vaults are valuable; men did not care to feel that.

She stopped for the duration of a glance around her, as if to recapture the place, but there was no recognition of persons in her eyes, the glance merely swept through the room, as if making a swift inventory of physical objects.

In the transition to statism, every infringement of human rights has begun with a given right's least attractive practitioners

There was no action she could take against the men of undeined thought, of unnamed motives, of unstated purposes, of unspecified morality. There was nothing she could say to them - nothing would be heard or answered. What were the weapons, she thought, in a realm where reason was not a weapon any longer? It was a realm she could not enter.

She smiled. I know, this is a place where one employs nothing but aristocrats for the lousiest kinds of jobs. They're all aristocrats, that's true, said Wyatt, because they know that there's no such thing as a lousy job--only lousy men who don't care to do it.