Quotes from Ayn Rand

We were guilty of the great transgression of preference!

no view of men except as sacrificial animals and profiteers-on-sacrifice, as victims and parasites—that it permits no concept of a benevolent co-existence

Years ago, a well-known political writer, Isabel Paterson, was talking to a businessman outraged by some government action. She urged him to speak up for his principles. "I agree with you totally," he said, "but I'm not in a position right now to do it." "The only position required," she replied, "is vertical.

Don't ever get angry at a man for stating the truth." "That particular truth was none of his business." "His particular estimate of it was none of your concern or mine.

He asked simply, as if the matter of her presence were not unusual at all: "Did you have a hard time climbing those stairs?" She answered, "A little. All climbing is hard. But it's usually worth it.

Roark threw his head up once, for a flash of a second, to look at Heller across the table. It was all the introduction they needed; it was like a handshake.

There is no way to make a human being accept the role of a sacrificial animal except by destroying his self-esteem. There is no way to destroy his self-esteem except by making him reject his own consciousness. There is no way to make him reject his own consciousness except by convincing him of its impotence.

We are one of the Damned.

Bajo la piel todos somos hermanos, y estaría dispuesto a despellejar a la humanidad para demostrarlo

People meant very little to Mike, but their performance a great deal. He worshiped expertness of any kind. He loved his work passionately and had no tolerance for anything save for other single-track devotions. He was a master in his own field and he felt no sympathy except for mastery. His view of the world was simple: there were the able and there were the incompetent; he was not concerned with the latter. He loved buildings. He despised, however, all architects.

Why should you care about the others?" "Because I like to understand things, and there's something about people that I can't understand.

The secret of the Witch Doctor's power lies in the fact that man needs an integrated view of life, a philosophy, whether he is aware of his need or not—and whenever, through ignorance, cowardice or mental sloth, men choose not to be aware of it, their chronic sense of guilt, uncertainty and terror makes them feel that the Witch Doctor's philosophy is true.

Helplessness was a strange experience, new to her; she had never found it hard to face things and make decisions; but she was not dealing with things—this was a fog without shapes or definitions, in which something kept forming and shifting before it could be seen...

As to the role of emotions in art and the subconscious mechanism that serves as the integrating factor both in artistic creation and in man's response to art, they involve a psychological phenomenon which we call a sense of life. A sense of life is a pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics, an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence.

Man's unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself.

A man who surrenders his value is at mercy of anyone's will.

All the codes of ethics they'll try to ram down your throat are just so much paper money put out by swindlers to fleece people of their virtues. The code of competence is the only system of morality that's on a gold standard.

It was the only lie she ever told. She did not do it to protect Francisco; she did it because she felt, for some reason which she could not define, that the incident was a secret too precious to share.

The story is the story of Howard Roark's triumph. It has to show what the man is, what he wants and how he gets it. It has to be a triumphant epic of man's spirit, a hymn glorifying a man's "I." It has to show every conceivable hardship and obstacle on his way—and how he triumphs over them, why he has to triumph.

One night, lightning struck the oak tree. Eddie saw it the next morning. It lay broken in half, and he looked into its trunk as into the mouth of a black tunnel. The trunk was only an empty shell; its heart had rotted away long ago; there was nothing inside—just a thin gray dust that was being dispersed by the whim of the faintest wind. The living power had gone, and the shape it left had not been able to stand without it. Years

No battle was hard, no decision was dangerous where there was no soggy uncertainty, no shapeless evasion to encounter.

Other people are human. They're sensitive. They can't devote their whole life to metals and engines. You're lucky- you've never had any feelings. You've never felt anything at all.

When numbers are substituted for morality, and no individual can claim a right, but any gang can assert any desire whatever, when compromise is the only policy expected of those in power, and the preservation of the moment's "stability," of peace at any price, is their only goal—the winner, necessarily, is whoever presents the most unjust and irrational demands; the system serves as an open invitation to do so.

and the diamond band on the wrist of her naked arm gave her the most feminine of all aspects: the look of being chained.