Quotes from Ayn Rand

When one acts on pity against justice, it is the good whom one punishes for the sake of the evil; when one saves the guilty from suffering, it is the innocent whom one forces to suffer.

She saw the man below looking at her, she saw the insolent hint of amusement tell her that he knew she did not want him to look at her now. She turned her head away.

Here, we trade achievements, not failures—values, not needs. We're free of one another, yet we all grow together.

A wall of the most effective soundproofing: indifference.

all claim to an individual taste is bad taste

Fight for the value of your person. Fight for the virtue of your pride. Fight for the essence of that which is man: for his sovereign rational mind. Fight with the radiant certainty and the absolute rectitude of knowing that yours is the Morality of Life and that yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth.

Barre a un lado a esos místicos corrompidos por el odio, que se presentan como amigos de la humanidad y predican que la más alta virtud que un hombre puede practicar es considerar que su propia vida carece de valor.

Cuando alguien acusa a otro de no tener sentimientos, ello significa que tal persona es justa. Que se trata de un ser cuyas emociones nunca carecen de base, de alguien que nunca otorgará sentimientos que el otro no merezca. Significa que sentir es ir contra la razón, contra los valores morales y contra la realidad.

What was happening to him?—he wondered. The impossible conflict of feeling reluctance to do that which was right—wasn't it the basic formula of moral corruption? To recognize one's guilt, yet feel nothing but the coldest, most profound indifference.

Your eyes are as a flame, but our brothers have neither hope nor fire. Your mouth is cut of granite but our brothers are soft and humble. Your head is high, but our brothers cringe. You walk, but our brothers crawl. We wish to be Damned with you, rather than blessed with all our brothers. Do as you please with us, but do not send us away from you.

Politically, statism breeds a swarm of "little Caesars," who are motivated by power-lust. Culturally, statism breeds still lower a species: a swarm of "little Neros," who sing odes to depravity while the lives of their forced audiences go up in smoke.

humanity's darkest evil, the most destructive horror machine among all the devices of men, is non-objective law.

the first word of 'Free, scientific inquiry' was redundant. He seems to have forgotten it. Well, I'll just say that 'Governmental scientific inquiry' is a contradiction in terms.

of any achievements open to you, the one that makes all others possible is the creation of your own character—that

I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

Lois Cook said that words must be freed from the oppression of reason. She said the stranglehold of reason upon words is like the exploitation of the masses by the capitalists. Words must be permitted to negotiate with reason through collective bargaining. That's what she said. She's so amusing and refreshing.

He didn't want to be great, but to be thought great.

Value is that which one acts to gain and/or keep—virtue is the act by which one gains and/or keeps it. The three cardinal values of the Objectivist ethics—the three values which, together, are the means to and the realization of one's ultimate value, one's own life—are: Reason, Purpose, Self-Esteem, with their three corresponding virtues: Rationality, Productiveness, Pride.

Be it a highwayman who confronts a traveler with the ultimatum: 'Your money or your life,' or a politician who confronts a country with the ultimatum: 'Your children's education or your life,' the meaning of that ultimatum is: 'Your mind or your life'—and neither is possible to man without the other. "If there are degrees

I don't know what they did to him to make him sign, but I know that it must have been something terrible. Everybody thinks so. Everybody's whispering about it, wondering what sort of pressure was used on him. .

glad to be living. If this is a vice, then we wish no virtue.

they have nothing to fight me with, save the brute force of their numbers. I have my mind.

I have, let's say, sixty years to live. Most of that time will be spent working. I've chosen the work I want to do. If I find no joy in it, then I'm only condemning myself to sixty years of torture.

For the next few weeks there will be no political discussions in America: we have entered the Season of Platitudes—an election campaign. All issues, principles and definitions vanish during an election campaign. They dissolve into a fog of rubber terms that can mean anything to anyone—while the candidates compete for how to be misunderstood-in the greatest number of ways by the greatest number of people.