Quotes from Ayn Rand

It is not happiness, but suffering that we consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that we regard as the abnormal exception in human life.

An inventor is a man who asks 'Why?' of the universe and lets nothing stand between the answer and his mind.

The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When

He slipped the sketch to the bottom of the pile. "Architecture is primarily a utilitarian conception, and the problem is to elevate the principle of pragmatism into the realm of esthetic abstraction. All else is nonsense.

Man's mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not." stated by John Galt

He never seeks or desires the unearned.

Those who seek some sort of a higher purpose or 'universal goal,' who don't know what to live for, who moan that they must 'find themselves.' You hear it all around us. That seems to be the official bromide of our century. Every book you open. Every drooling self-confession. It seems to be the noble thing to confess. I'd think it would be the most shameful one.

If it is now the belief of my fellow men, who call themselves the public, that their good requires victims, then I say: 'The public good be damned, I will have no part of it!

Ese muchacho es vulnerable. Posee demasiada capacidad para el placer. ¿Qué hará en un mundo donde existen tan raras ocasiones de dicha?

The statue of a naked woman. If you understand the building, you understand what the figure must be. The human spirit. The heroic in man. The aspiration and the fulfillment, both. Uplifted in its quest - and uplifting by its own essence. Seeking God - and finding itself.

El adversario al que se veía obligada a combatir no le parecía ya digno de la lucha ni de la victoria; no era una superior inteligencia la que desafiaba, sino la ineptitud; una gris extensión algodonosa, blanda y sin forma, que no ofrecía resistencia a nada ni a nadie...

because he knew that he was coming for the last time. That morning he had been expelled from the Architectural School of the Stanton Institute of Technology.

What is morality?" she asked. "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?

A good novel is an indivisible sum: every scene, sequence and passage of a good novel has to involve, contribute to and advance all three of its major attributes: theme, plot, characterization.

Si identificáis vuestras creencias, hallaráis en ellas una triple condenación: hacia vosotros, hacia la vida y hacia la virtud, en la grotesca conclusión a que habéis llegado al creer que la moralidad es un mal necesario.

If you write a whole line of zeros,it's still nothing, (Kira Alexandrovna)

what I'm like—except tonight." "Do you live here alone, like this, miles away from everything?" Wyatt pointed at the window. "I'm a couple of steps away from—everything." "What about people?" "I have guest rooms for the kind of people who come to see me on business. I want as many miles as possible between myself and all the other kinds.

What is kinder—to believe the best of people and burden them with a nobility beyond their endurance—or to see them as they are, and accept it because it makes them comfortable?

What is morality, or ethics? It is a code of values to guide man's choices and actions—the choices and actions that determine the purpose and the course of his life. Ethics, as a science, deals with discovering and defining such a code.

La libertad que buscas es libertad del hecho de que si tu riqueza la hiciste robando, eres un ladrón, no importa cuánto dones a la caridad o cuántas plegarias recites;

I saw that any man's desire for money he could not earn was regarded as a righteous wish, but if he earned it, it was damned as greed

And then they stopped smiling. The corpse they saw in the weeds by the roadside was a rusty cylinder with bits of glass—the remnant of a gas-station pump.

Do you know the conditions of existence in those People's States? Since production and trade—not violence—were decreed to be crimes, the best men of Europe had no choice but to become criminals. The slave-drivers of those States are kept in power by the handouts from their fellow looters in countries not yet fully drained, such as this country.

He was accustomed to hostility; this kind of benevolence was more offensive than hostility. He shrugged; he thought that he would be out of here soon and back in the simple, clean reality of his own office.