Quotes from Ayn Rand

Man's mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action...To remain alive, he must think.

One cannot hate the earth in their name. The earth is beautiful. And it is a background, but not theirs.

The theme is the evil of divorcing ideals from life.

People turned to look at Howard Roark as he passed. Some remained staring after him with sudden resentment. They could give no reason for it: it was an instinct his presence awakened in most people.

so you see, Roark though it is to be a religious edifice, it is also more than that. you notice that we call it the temple of the human spirit. We want to capture- in stone, as others capture in music- not some narrow creed, but the essence of all religion. and what is the essence of religion? The great aspiration of the human spirit toward the highest, the noblest, the best. the great life giving force of the universe. The heroic human spirit.

Both of them smiled derisively. But Francisco seemed to laugh at things because he saw something much greater. Jim laughed as if he wanted to let nothing remain great.

Their terror had the evasive quality of guilt: it was not the fear that comes from understanding, but from the refusal to understand.

The dance is the silent partner of music and participates in a division of labor: music presents a stylized version of man's consciousness in action—the dance presents a stylized version of man's body in action.

Roark spoke quietly. He was the only man in the room who felt certain of his own words.

You honest men are such a problem and such a headache. But we knew you'd slip sooner or later—and this is just what we wanted. You seem to be pleased about it. Don't I have good reason to be? But, after all, I did break one of your laws. Well, what do you think they're for?

You know, I don't think that I really believe it—all that's happening to us these days. It's happening all right, but I don't believe it. I keep thinking that insanity is a state where a person can't tell what's real. Well, what's real now is insane—and if I accepted it as real, I'd have to lose my mind, wouldn't I? . . .

dangers, to Francisco, were merely opportunities for another brilliant performance; there were no battles he could lose, no enemies to beat him.

Sex is the physical expression of a tribute to personal values.

She said 'no' to the words he spoke, and 'yes' to the voice that spoke them.

If his judgment is to be an object of sacrifice — what sort of efficacy, control, freedom from conflict, or serenity of spirit will be possible to man?

Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another—their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.

She felt that his presence seemed more intensely real when she kept her eyes away from him, almost as if the stressed awareness of herself came from him, like the sunlight from the water.

If we don't use ugly words, we won't have any ugliness

We are all trained by today's colleges never to take a firm stand on any subject: to be pragmatists, ready to compromise with anyone on anything. Philosophy and morality, however, do not work by compromise. Just as a healthy body cannot compromise with poison, so too a good man cannot compromise with evil ideas. In such a set up, an evil philosophy, like poison, always wins. The good can win only by being consistent. If it is not, then the evil is given the means to win every time.

only a thin steel ring that cut the rocks in half. The rocks went on into the depth, unchanged. They began

It was as if he were a single whole, grasped by her first glance at him, like some irreducible absolute, like an axiom not to be explained any further, as if she knew everything about him by direct perception, and what awaited her now was only the process of identifying her knowledge.

For the word 'We' must never be spoken, save by one's choice and as a second thought. This word must never be placed first within man's soul, else it becomes a monster, the root of all the evils on earth, the root of man's torture by men, and of an unspeakable lie.

He thought of all the living species that train their young in the art of survival, the cats who teach their kittens to hunt, the birds who spend such strident effort on teaching their fledglings to fly—yet man, whose tool of survival is the mind, does not merely fail to teach a child to think, but devotes the child's education to the purpose of destroying his brain, of convincing him that thought is futile and evil, before he has started to think.

At first, man was enslaved by the gods. But he broke their chains. Then he was enslaved by the kings. But he broke their chains. He was enslaved by his birth, by his kin, by his race. But he broke their chains.