Quotes from Ayn Rand

So the advocacy of "ethnicity," means racism plus tradition i.e., racism plus conformity i.e., racism plus staleness.

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 . . . No, not Francisco d'Anconia, not Hank Rearden, not any man she had ever met or admired . . . 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 . . .

Howard, everything you've done in your life is wrong according to the stated ideals of mankind. And here you are. And somehow it seems a huge joke on the whole world.

Si, antes de emprender alguna acción, tienes que obtener el permiso de la sociedad, no eres libre, te sea concedido ese permiso o no. Solamente un esclavo actúa bajo permiso. Un permiso no es un derecho.

To love a woman for her virtues is meaningless. She's earned it, it's a payment, not a gift. But to love her for her vices is a real gift, unearned and undeserved. To love her for her vices is to defile all virtue for her sake—and that is a real tribute of love, because you sacrifice your conscience, your reason, your integrity and your invaluable self-esteem.

We were defeated by the greed, the selfishness and the base, animal nature of men. It was the eternal conflict between spirit and matter, between soul and body. They would not renounce their bodies, which was all we asked of them.

He hated stupidity. It was the only emotion I had ever seen him display toward people—a

In a world that proclaims the non-existence of the mind, the moral righteousness of rule by brute force, the penalizing of the competent in favor of the incompetent, the sacrifice of the best to the worst - in such a world, the best have to turn against society and have to become its deadliest enemies.

I trust that no one will tell me that men such as I write about don't exist. That this book has been written—and published—is my proof that they do.

Thought—he told himself quietly—is a weapon one uses in order to act. No action was possible. Thought is the tool by which one makes a choice. No choice was left to him. Thought sets one's purpose and the way to reach it. In the matter of his life being torn piece by piece out of him, he was to have no voice, no purpose, no way, no defense.

We have met once," she said, "at the Holcombes. If Mr. Roark remembers.

I had felt no hatred in all the years when they rejected me. If my work was new, I had to give them time to learn, if I took pride in being first to break a trail to a height of my own, I had no right to complain if others were slow to follow.

Self-sacrifice, we drool, is a virtue. Is sacrifice a virtue? Can a man sacrifice his integrity? His honor? His freedom? His ideal? His convictions? The honesty of his feeling? The independence of his thoughts? But these are a man's supreme possessions. Anything he gives up for them is not a sacrifice but an easy bargain.

The man who lies to the world, is the world's slave from then on.

Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice. If he abdicates his power, he abdicates the status of man, and the grinding chaos of the irrational is what he achieves as his sphere of existence—by his own choice.

He saw for the first time that he had never known fear because, against any disaster, he had held the omnipotent cure of being able to act.

One does not bargain over inches of evil.

No," she said, before he could utter a word, "you can't take me home. I have a car waiting. Thank you just the same.

Whatever it was that others sought in life, their right to what they now felt was all the two of them wished to find.

Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads.

I breathe for my own necessity, for the fuel of my body, for my survival ... I've given you, not my sacrifice or my pity, but my ego and my naked need

If men like Boyle think that force is all they need to rob their betters—let them see what happens when one of their betters chooses to resort to force.

I've always been short on time in my life, never on what to use it for.

My way of trading is to know that the joy you give me is paid for by the joy you get from me—not by your suffering or mine. I don't accept sacrifices and I don't make them. If you asked me for more than you meant to me, I would refuse. If you asked me to give up the railroad, I'd leave you. If ever the pleasure of one has to be bought by the pain of the other, there better be no trade at all. A trade by which one gains and the other loses is a fraud.