Quotes from Ayn Rand

The Romanticists did not present a hero as a statistical average, but as an abstraction of man's best and highest potentiality, applicable to and achievable by all men, in various degrees, according to their individual choices.

Reason requires freedom, self-confidence and self-esteem. It requires the right to think and to act on the guidance of one's thinking—the right to live by one's own independent judgment. Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries.

As one stands before its southern façade, one is stricken with the realization that the stringcourses, repeated with deliberate and gracious monotony from the third to the eighteenth story, these long, straight, horizontal lines are the moderating, leveling principle, the lines of equality.

The justice which would forgive miles of innocent errors of knowledge, would not forgive a single step taken in conscious evil.

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. And that is the way you feel, too, Hank, about yourself—whether you admit it or not.

He looked at the paper before him. He wondered why ineptitude should exist and have its say.

Look," said Roark evenly, and pointed at the window. "Can you see the campus and the town? Do you see how many men are walking and living down there? Well, I don't give a damn what any or all of them think about architecture—or about anything else, for that matter. Why should I consider what their grandfathers thought of it?

Philosophically, Romanticism is a crusade to glorify man's existence; psychologically, it is experienced simply as the desire to make life interesting.

Tôi không thích nh?ng ng??i c? ch? nói nh?ng gì mà h? cho là tôi nghÄ©

She did not mind this new background; she was indifferent to the slums as she had been indifferent to the drawing rooms.

When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others.

I'd rather be kind than right.

Should the soul vanish from the earth, the motors would stop, because that is the power which keeps them going—not the oil under the floor under her feet, the oil that would then become primeval ooze again—not the steel cylinders that would become stains of rust on the walls of the caves of shivering savages—the power of a living mind—the power of thought and choice and purpose.

She knew that neither his clothes nor the years stood between her and the living intactness of that memory.

It is here, it exists—but one must enter it naked and alone, with no rags from the falsehoods of centuries, with the purest clarity of mind—not an innocent heart, but that which is much rarer: an intransigent mind—as one's only possession and key.

No olvides que el estado natural del hombre es una postura erguida, una mente intransigente y un paso vivaz capaz de recorrer caminos ilimitados. No permitas que se extinga tu fuego, chispa a chispa, cada una de ellas irremplazable, en los pantanos sin esperanza de lo aproximado, lo casi, lo no aún, lo nunca jamás. No permitas que perezca el héroe que llevas en tu alma, en solitaria frustración por la vida que merecías pero que nunca pudiste alcanzar.

If, to him, love was a celebration of one's self and of existence—then, to the self-haters and life-haters, the pursuit of destruction was the only form and equivalent of love.

Why does the number of those others take the place of truth? Why is truth made a mere matter of arithmetic—and only of addition at that?

You are an unusual, brilliant child who has not seen enough of life to grasp the full measure of human stupidity.

The most beautiful words were those which were not needed.

The hours ahead, like all her nights with him, would be added, she thought, to that savings account of one's life where moments of time are stored in the pride of having been lived.

Don't you know....don't you know that there are things, in the best of us, which no outside hand should dare touch? Things sacred because, and only because, one can say: 'This is mine'? Don't you know that we live only for ourselves, the best of us do, those who are worthy of it? Don't you know that there is something in us which must not be touched by any state, by any collective, by any number of the millions?

Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth—the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money?

in the wisdom of women the Golden One had understood more than we can understand.