Quotes from Ayn Rand

Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it... John Galt

it was not the mockery of malice—it was the laughter of a salute.

He defeated her by admitting her power; she could not have the gratification of enforcing it.

Her face looked as if she knew his worst suffering and it was hers and she wished to bear it like this, coldly, asking no words of mitigation.

In the eyes of his contemporaries, he was a man who had committed the one unforgivable sin; he was proud of his wealth.

I want to see, real, living, and in the hours of my own days, that glory I create as an illusion! I want it real! I want to know that there is someone, somewhere, who wants it, too! Or else what is the use of seeing it, and working, and burning oneself for an impossible vision? A spirit, too, needs fuel. It can run dry.

It's so much easier to pass judgment on a man than on an idea.

No. Forget it. You're only fooling yourself." "About what?" "About anything being worth a damn. It's dust, lady, all of it, dust and blood.

We wish to be damned with you, rather than blessed with all our brothers. Do

Nobody stays in this valley except by a full, conscious choice based on a full, conscious knowledge of every fact involved in his decision. Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever.

I owe nothing to my brothers, nor do I gather debts from them. I ask none to live for me, nor do I live for any others. I covet no man's soul, nor is my soul theirs to covet.

Listen to what is being preached today. Look at everyone around us. You've wondered why they suffer, why they seek happiness and never find it. If any man stopped and asked himself whether he's ever held a truly personal desire, he'd find the answer. He'd see that all his wishes, his efforts, his dreams, his ambitions are motivated by other men.

It was a hymn with the force of a march, a march with the majesty of a hymn. It was a song of soldiers bearing sacred banners and of priests carrying swords. It was an anthem to the sanctity of strength.

there's nothing of any importance in life—except how well you do your work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are, will come from that. It's the only measure of human value.

I and they, my chosen friends, my fellow-builders, shall write the firsts chapter in the new history of man

She had ordered him out of her office, and had sat in incredulous horror before the fact that the most vicious statement she had ever heard had been uttered in a tone of moral righteousness.

It has been a day of wonder, this, our first day in the forest.

I think its agreeable to look back occasionally as one's perspective widens and one grows richer spiritually with the years

A "selfless," "disinterested" love is a contradiction in terms: it means that one is indifferent to that which one values.

Wynand's face was more than the face of a stranger: a stranger's face is an unapproached potentiality, to be opened if one makes the choice and effort; this was a face known, closed and never to be reached again.

I think the only cardinal evil on earth is that of placing your prime concern within other men. I've always demanded a certain quality in the people I liked. I've always recognized it at once—and it's the only quality I respect in men. I chose my friends by that...A self-sufficient ego. Nothing else matters.

before you can do things for people, you must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the secondary consequences. The work, not the people.

This was men's moral code in the outer world, a code that told them to act on the premise of one another's weakness, deceit and stupidity, and this was the pattern of their lives, this struggle through a fog of the pretended and unacknowledged, this belief that facts are not solid or final, this state where, denying any form to reality, men stumble through life, unreal and unformed, and die having never been born.

She knew that she could not move until he permitted her to. She saw his mouth and the silent contempt in the shape of his mouth; the planes of his gaunt, hollow cheeks; the cold, pure brilliance of the eyes that had no trace of pity. She knew it was the most beautiful face she would ever see, because it was the abstraction of strength made visible.