Quotes from Ayn Rand

Jim appeared to her suddenly as a man who had tried to find a middle course between two poles—Meigs and herself—and who was now seeing that his course was narrowing and that he was to be ground between two straight walls.

There was a time, she thought, when his mind, his energy, his inexhaustible resourcefulness had been given to the task of a producer devising better ways to deal with nature; now, they were switched to the task of a criminal outwitting men. She wondered how long a man could endure a change of that kind.

She looked at the adults, wondering how they could imagine that she would feel guilt from an undefined accusation.

He thought...that man's work should be a higher step, an improvement on nature, not a degradation. He did not want to despise men; he wanted to love and admire them.

Quien le miente al mundo es esclavo del mundo a partir de ese momento.

The action of naming an issue instead of evading it, was so unlike the usual behavior of all the men he knew, it was such a sudden, startling relief...

Ni la vida ni la felicidad pueden lograrse persiguiendo caprichos irracionales.

They're all aristocrats, that's true, said Wyatt, because they know that there's no such thing as a lousy job - only lousy men who don't care to do it.

It's your acceptance of this place that I want. What good would it do me, to have your physical presence without any meaning? That's the kind of faked reality by which most people cheat themselves of their lives.

Since everything man needs has to be discovered by his own mind and produced by his own effort, the two essentials of the method of survival proper to a rational being are: thinking and productive work.

Life is growth; not to move forward, is to fall backward; life remains life, only so long as it advances.

that heavy, indifferent lassitude which is not the will to laziness, but the frustration of the will to a secret violence that no lesser action can satisfy. That

He never felt loneliness except when he was happy.

The entire history of science is a progression of exploded fallacies, not of achievements." "The more we know, the more we learn that we know nothing.

I think that it's a sin to sit down and let your life go, without making a try for it.

The desire was not directed at the unknown thug who had sent a bullet through the boy's body, or at the looting bureaucrats who had hired the thug to do it, but at the boy's teachers who had delivered him, disarmed, to the thug's gun—at the soft, safe assassins of college classrooms who, incompetent to answer the queries of a quest for reason, took pleasure in crippling the young minds entrusted to their care.

Dagny, it's not that I don't suffer, it's that I know the unimportance of suffering, I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one's soul and as a permanent scar across one's view of existence.

Un ser de conciencia volitiva no puede seguir una conducta automática. Necesita un código de valores para guiar sus acciones. El valor hay que ganarlo y conservarlo; la virtud es la acción por la que se gana y se conserva aquél. El valor presupone una respuesta a la pregunta: ¿Valor para quién y para qué? El valor presupone una norma, un propósito y la necesidad de actuar frente a una alternativa. Donde no hay alternativas no son posibles los valores.

directly, the citizens would (and should) be willing to pay for such services, as they pay for insurance.

Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter.

Morality is a code of black and white. When and if men attempt a compromise, it is obvious which side will necessarily lose and which will necessarily profit. Such are the reasons why—when one is asked: "Surely you don't think in terms of black-and-white, do you?"—the proper answer (in essence, if not in form) should be: "You're damn right I do!

She wanted to tell him of the years she had spent looking for men such as he to work with; she wanted to tell him that his enemies were hers, that she was fighting the same battle...

city. It looked as it had always looked. He walked on, reminding himself that he

The theoretical purpose of that grotesque absurdity is to establish a moral inversion: to make the initiation of force moral, and resistance to force immoral—and thus to obliterate the right of self-defense. The immediate practical purpose is to foster the activities of the lowest political breed: the provocateurs, who commit acts of force and place the blame on their victims.