Quotes from Ayn Rand

Do you have to be quite so fanatical and selfless about it? What? Roark asked, incredulously. Fanatical and selfless! Roark smiled. He looked down at his drawings. His elbowed moved, pressing them to his body. He said That was the most selfish thing you've ever seen a man do.

Su propósito reside en privaros de todo concepto de que dependa la mente humana, su vida y su cultura: el concepto de una realidad objetiva. Identificad el desarrollo de una conciencia humana y conoceréis el propósito de su credo.

If one feels compassion for the victims of a concentration camp, one cannot feel it for the torturers. If one does feel compassion for the torturers, it is an act of moral treason toward the victims.

Are you beginning to see who is John Galt? I am the man who has earned the thing you didn't fight for.... I am proud of my own value and of the fact that I wish to live.

I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone's right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need. "I wished to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others.

Bill Brent knew nothing about epistemology; but he knew that man must live by his own rational perception of reality, that he cannot act against it or escape it or find a substitute for it—and that there is no other way for him to live. He

Some give up at the first touch of pressure; some sell out; some run down by imperceptible degrees and lose their fire, never knowing when or how they lost it.

Cuando un hombre declara: ¿Quién soy yo para saberlo? Lo que declara es esto: ¿Quien soy yo para vivir?

I love this work. I want to see it erected. I want to make it real, living, functioning, built. But every living thing is integrated. Do you know what that means? Whole, pure, complete, unbroken. Do you know what constitutes an integrating principle? A thought. The one thought, the single thought that created the thing and every part of it.

She's like nothing you bastards ever dreamed of!

Thought is a primitive superstition. Reason is an irrational idea.

wearily distasteful resignation: it seemed easier to attend the wedding than to bother explaining her absence afterwards.

If the rest of them can survive only by destroying us, then why should we wish them to survive?

Para vivir, el hombre ha de considerar tres cosas como los valores supremos gobernantes de su vida: Razón, Propósito, Estima propia. La Razón como única herramienta de conocimiento, el Propósito como su elección de felicidad que con aquella herramienta ha de poder conseguir; la estima propia como inviolable certidumbre de que su mente es competente para pensar y su persona digna de la felicidad, lo que significa digna de vivir.

There was a time when I looked at the tragic mess they've made of this earth, and I wanted to cry out, to beg them to listen—I could teach them to live so much better than they did—but there was nobody to hear me, they had nothing to hear me with. . . . Intelligence? It is such a rare, precarious spark that flashes for a moment somewhere among men, and vanishes. One cannot tell its nature, or its future . . . or its death. . . .

Judgment to distinguish right and wrong, vision to see the truth, courage to act upon it, dedication to that which is good, integrity to stand by the good at any price. But where does one find it?

Is it true that in the future society any woman will sleep with any man she wants," asked Renée Slottern. It had started as a question, but it petered out. She did not really want to know. She merely felt a vapid wonder about how it felt to have a man one really wanted and how one went about wanting.

good to enjoy it at the price of the blood of others.

is that if one suffers in this world, it's on account of error.

man's life must be a straight line of motion from goal to farther goal, each leading to the next and to a single growing sum, like a journey...

moral absolute one does not

The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave.

Many men in the Homes of the Scholars have had strange new ideas in the past," said Solidarity 8-1164, "but when the majority of their brother Scholars voted against them, they abandoned their ideas, as all men must.

Redeem your mind from the hockshops of authority.