Quotes from Ayn Rand

Durante siglos la batalla de la moralidad fue librada entre quienes proclamaban que la vida pertenece a Dios y quienes decían que pertenece al prójimo, entre quienes predicaban que la bondad es el autosacrificio en favor de unos fantasmas celestes y quienes predicaban que el bien es el auto-sacrificio en favor de los incompetentes de la tierra. Pero nadie vino a decir que vuestra vida os pertenece y que el bien reside en vivirla.

Once a country accepts censorship of the press and of speech, then nothing can be won without violence. Therefore, so long as you have free speech, protect it. This is the life-and-death issue in this country: do not give up the freedom of the press—of newspapers, books, magazines, television, radios, movies, and every other form of presenting ideas. So long as that's free, a peaceful intellectual turn is possible.

It's so much easier to pass judgment on a man than on an idea. Though how in hell one passes judgment on a man without considering the content of his brain is more than I'll ever understand.

To say 'I love you' one must first be able to say the 'I.

Observe also that an honest theoretician does not try to present his ideas in the guise of their opposites. But Kant's philosophy is presented as "pure reason"—altruism is presented as a doctrine of "love"—communism is presented as "liberation"—and egalitarianism is presented as "justice.

Dios es aquello que la mente humana no puede concebir, afirman, y luego os piden que consideréis tal cosa como conocimiento; Dios no es hombre, el cielo no es tierra, el alma no es el cuerpo, la virtud no es provecho, A no es A, la percepción no es sensorial, el conocimiento no es rázon. Sus definiciones no constituyen el acto de definir, sino el de borrar.

She looked at her plate, bitterly, almost as if she were afraid to touch it. "It's the most expensive breakfast I'll ever eat, considering the value of the cook's time and of all those others." "Yes—from one aspect. But from another, it's the cheapest breakfast you'll ever eat—because no part of it has gone to feed the looters who'll make you pay for it through year after year and leave you to starve in the end.

The general policy of the press had been stated by a famous editor five years ago. "There are no objective facts," he had said. "Every report on facts is only somebody's opinion. It is, therefore, useless to write about facts." A

The irrational is the impossible; it is that which contradicts the facts of reality; facts cannot be altered by a wish, but they can destroy the wisher. If a man desires and pursues contradictions–if he wants to have his cake and eat it, too–he disintegrates his consciousness; he turns his inner life into civil war of blind forces engaged in dark, incoherent, pointless, meaningles conflicts.

Si nos preguntamos cuáles son las razones que subyacen en la fea mezcla de cinismo y culpa en la que pasa su vida la mayoría de los hombres, diremos que son estas: cinismo, porque ni practican ni aceptan la moralidad altruista; culpa, porque no se atreven a rechazarla.

Si un hombre muere peleando por su propia libertad, eso no es un sacrificio: no está dispuesto a vivir como esclavo; pero sí es un sacrificio para el tipo de hombre que está dispuesto a ser esclavo.

There is no such thing as a natural monopoly, any more than there is a natural crime. There isn't a single profession or service of a productive nature that should be a monopoly , enforced by law. If any one businessman in a given field can successfully provide all the services and best products at the best price, you could loosely call that a natural monopoly, but it's not a monopoly in the usual sense—that is, it isn't coercive.

Your ego is your strictest judge.

The key concept, in the formation of a sense of life, is the term 'important'. It is a concept that belongs to the realm of values since it implies an answer to the question: Important – to whom?... It is only those values which he regards or grows to regard as 'important,' those which represent his implicit view of reality that remain in a man's subconscious and form his sense of life.

Aren't you capable of a sublime gesture on occasion? They all work so hard and struggle and suffer, trying to achieve beauty, trying to surpass one another in beauty. Let's surpass them all! Let's throw their sweat in their face. Let's destroy them at one stroke. Let's be gods. Let's be ugly.

ese valor y ese amor a la verdad se oponen al holgazán y al vagabundo que va de un lado al otro, asegurando orgulloso que ha alcanzado casi la perfección de un lunático porque es un artista sin la menor idea de lo que su arte es o significa.

The ethics of altruism has created the image of the brute, as its answer, in order to make men accept two inhuman tenets: (a) that any concern with one's own interests is evil, regardless of what these interests might be, and (b) that the brute's activities are in fact to one's own interest (which altruism enjoins man to renounce for the sake of his neighbors). For a view of the

There is only one path to heaven. On Earth we call it Love.

But what I say," she continued, "is that if one suffers in this world, it's on account of error. Of course, you'll have to give up the architect profession now, won't you? But then a young man can always earn a decent living clerking or selling or something.

For the rational, psychologically healthy man, the desire for pleasure is the desire to celebrate his control over reality.

no speech is ever considered, but only the speaker.

The letters said: ". . . in a momentous drama giving the answer to the great problem: Should a woman tell?

He could not forgive his country because it had given him a quarter of a billion dollars and then refused to grant him an equal amount of reverence. People would not take his views on art, literature, history, biology, sociology and metaphysics as they took his checks. He complained that people identified him with his money too much; he hated them because they did not identify him enough.

As there can be no causeless wealth, so there can be no causeless love or any sort of causeless emotion. An emotion is a response to a fact of reality, an estimate dictated by your standards. To love is to value.