Quotes from Ayn Rand

Las únicas funciones apropiadas de un gobierno son: la policía, para protegerte de los criminales; el ejército, para protegerte de invasores extranjeros, y los tribunales, para proteger tu propiedad y tus contratos de las violaciones, incumplimientos o fraudes de los otros, y para dirimir las disputas apelando a reglas racionales y según la ley objetiva.

And someday the world will discover that without thought there can be no love.

Un sistema social es un conjunto de principios moral-político-económicos encarnados en las leyes, las instituciones y el Gobierno de una sociedad que determinan las relaciones, las condiciones de asociación, entre los hombres que viven en un área geográfica determinada.

And now, sitting here in our tunnel, we wonder about these words. It is forbidden, not to be happy.

Because they're a bunch of miserable children who struggle to remain alive, desperately and very badly, while I—I don't even notice the burden.

Desde la necesidad más simple hasta la más alta abstracción religiosa, desde la rueda hasta el rascacielos, todo lo que somos y todo lo que tenemos procede de un solo atributo del hombre: la función de su mente razonadora.

to settle down into a job that requires less than your mind's full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay—that

They used to rush through here, it was the hurry of men who knew where they were going and were eager to get there. Now they're hurrying because they are afraid. It's not a purpose that drives them, it's fear. They're not going anywhere, they're escaping. And I don't think they know what it is that they want to escape.

shortest distance between two points is not a straight line—it's a middleman.

You can fake virtue for an audience. You can't fake it in your own eyes. Your ego is your strictest judge.

In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade that effort.

love is reverence, and worship, and glory, and the upward glance. Not a bandage for dirty sores. But they don't know it. Those who speak of love most promiscuously are the ones who've never felt it. They make some sort of feeble stew out of sympathy, compassion, contempt and general indifference, and they call it love. Once you've felt what it means to love as you and I know it—the total passion for the total height—you're incapable of anything less.

I don't blame our metallurgical department!" he said angrily. "I know that results of this kind are not a matter of any predictable time. But the public won't understand it. What, then, should we sacrifice? An excellent piece of smelting—or the last center of science left on earth, and the whole future of human knowledge? That is the alternative." She sat, her head down. After

Everything is something...

You know me like a book.What kind of book Peter? A dime novel? A love story? A crime thriller? Or just a plagiarized manuscript? No, let's say: like a serial. A good, long, exciting serial—with the last installment missing.

People want nothing but mirrors around them. To reflect them while they're reflecting too. You know, like the senseless infinity you get from two mirrors facing each other across a narrow passage. [...] Reflections of reflections and echoes of echoes.

the expression which, for both of them, meant that they felt at home with each other: an expression of contempt

I do not seek to derive my happiness from the injury or the favor of others, but earn it by my own achievement. Just

every human soul has a style of its own, also. Its one basic theme. You'll see it reflected in every thought, every act, every wish of that person. The one absolute, the one imperative in that living creature. Years of studying a man won't show it to you. His face will. You'd have to write volumes to describe a person. Think of his face. You need nothing else.

In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromiser is the transmitting rubber tube.

This is still faith in their rationality, in the omnipotence of reason. The mistake? Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone.)

From college professors and authors and judges and ministers! Everybody! Dirt farmers and international names!...I don't know what she does to them all - but she does something. She's not a movie star to them - she's a goddess.

Sacrifice' does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious. 'Sacrifice' does not mean the rejection of the evil for the sake of the good, but of the good for the sake of the evil. 'Sacrifice' is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don't.

It's too late, Peter.