Quotes from Ayn Rand

Through the years of his struggle, he had learned that an apparently causeless antagonism was not hard to deal with, but an apparently causeless solicitude was an ugly danger.

But neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims.

Our first rule here...is that one must always see for oneself.

whatever we are, it's we who move the world and it's we who'll pull it through.

When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is learning to understand and control the behavior of crop plants and domestic animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized.

Eddie, what do we care about people like him? We're driving an express, and they're riding on the roof, making a lot of noise about being leaders. Why should we care? We have enough power to carry them along – haven't we?

Do not expect consistency. Everything is a contradiction of everything else. Nothing exists but contradictions.

The adversary she found herself forced to fight was not worth matching or beating; it was not a superior ability which she would have found honor in challenging; it was ineptitude—a gray spread of cotton that 'seemed soft and shapeless, that could offer no resistance to anything or anybody, yet managed to be a barrier in her way.

An inventor is a man who asks 'Why?

Your house is made by its own needs. Those others are made by the need to impress. The determining motive of your house is in the house. The determining motive of the other is in the audience.

He lost, for that moment, all the days and dogmas of his past; his concepts, his problems, his pain were wiped out; he knew only—as from a great, clear distance—that man exists for the achievement of his desires, and he wondered why he stood here, he wondered who had the right to demand that he waste a single irreplaceable hour of his life, when his only desire was to seize the slender figure in gray and hold her through the length of whatever time there was left for him to exist.

What I described last," said Francisco, "is any man who proclaims his right to a single penny of another man's effort.

The process of observing the facts of reality and of integrating them into concepts is, in essence, a process of induction. The process of subsuming new instances under a known concept is, in essence, a process of deduction.

the informality of his posture, combined with the strict formality of his clothes, gave him an air of superlative elegance. His was the only face that had the carefree look and the brilliant smile proper to the enjoyment of a party; but his eyes seemed intentionally expressionless, holding no trace of gaiety, showing—like a warning signal—nothing but the activity of a heightened perceptiveness.

We lived by that which we held to be good and punished that which we held to be evil. You live by that which you denounce as evil and punish that which you know to be good.

It [Romanticism] is concerned—in the words of Aristotle—not with things as they are, but with things as they might be and ought to be.

But Dr. Stadler, this book was not intended to be read by scientists. It was written for that drunken lout. What do you mean? For the general public. But, good God! The feeblest imbecile should be able to see the glaring contradictions in every one of your statements. Let us put it this way, Dr. Stadler. The man who doesn't see that, deserves to believe all my statements.

Do you always have to have a purpose? Do you always have to be so damn serious? Can't you ever do things without reason, just like everybody else? You're so serious, so old. Everything's important with you, everything's great, significant in some way, every minute, even when you keep still. Can't you ever be comfortable—and unimportant?

She thought: To find a feeling that would hold, as their sum, as their final expression, the purpose of all the things she loved on earth . . . To find a consciousness like her own, who would be the meaning of her world, as she would be of his... A man who existed only in her knowledge of her capacity for an emotion she had never felt, but would have given her life to experience . . .

Señor d.'Anconia, what do you think is going to happen to the world?" "Just exactly what it deserves." "Oh, how cruel!" "Don't you believe in the operation of the moral law, madame?" Francisco asked gravely. "I do.

What glory can there be in the conquest of a mindless body?

There, he thought, was the final abortion of the creed of collective interdependence, the creed of non-identity, non-property, non-fact: the belief that the moral stature of one is at the mercy of the action of another.

The giants of the intellect, whom you admire so much, once taught you that the earth was flat and that the atom was the smallest particle of matter. The entire history of science is a progression of exploded fallacies, not of achievements.

He seemed casually at home, as if he felt that the place belonged to them, as they always felt wherever they went together.