Quotes from Ayn Rand

There's nothing of any importance in life - except how well you do your work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are, will come from that. It's the only measure of human value. All the codes of ethics they'll try to ram down your throat are just so much paper money put out by swindlers to fleece people of their virtues. The code of competence is the only system of morality that's on a gold standard.

She thought: at this moment, the glass stem between his fingers feels just like the one between mine. We have this much in common.

Reason can be fought with reason. How are you going to fight the unreasonable? The trouble with you, my dear, and with most people, is that you don't have sufficient respect for the senseless. The senseless is the major factor in our lives. You have no chance if it is your enemy.

I dont work with collectives. I don't consult, i don't co-operate, I don't collaborate.

Everyone has the right to make his own decisions, but none has the right to force his decision on others.

If you know that this life is all that you have, wouldn't you make the most of it?

Andrei, did you like the opera? Not particularly. Andrei, do you see what you're missing? I don't think I do, Kira. It's all rather silly. And useless. Can't you enjoy things that are useless, merely because they are beautiful? No. But I enjoyed it. The music? No. The way you listened to it.

The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see

She knew that even pain can be confessed, but to confess happiness is to stand naked, delivered to the witness, yet they could let each other see it without the need of protection.

Genius is an exaggeration of dimension. So is elephantiasis. Both may be only a disease.

A house can have integrity, just like a person,' said Roark, 'and just as seldom.

She knew that she could not have reached this white serenity except as the sum of all the colors, of all the violence she had known.

For the coming of that day shall I fight, I and my sons and my chosen friends. For the freedom of Man. For his rights. For his life. For his honor.

Never ask people. Not about your work. Don't you know what you want? How can you stand it, not to know?

Man—every man—is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others; he must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; he must work for his rational self-interest, with the achievement of his own happiness as the highest moral purpose of his life.

We'll meet again. We'll meet when years have passed, and years make such a difference, don't they?

I'll give you a hint. Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.

It's a curse, you know, to be able to look higher than you're allowed to reach.

To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. That is freedom. This and nothing else.

A "collective" mind does not exist. It is merely the sum of endless numbers of individual minds. If we have an endless number of individual minds who are weak, meek, submissive and impotent – who renounce their creative supremacy for the sake of the "whole" and accept humbly that the "whole's" verdict – we don't get a collective super-brain. We get only the weak, meek, submissive and impotent collective mind.

There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.

Remember that rights are moral principles which define and protect a man's freedom of action, but impose no obligations on other men.

Before you can do things for people, you must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the secondary consequences. The work, not the people. Your own action, not any possible object of your charity.

Ask anything of men. Ask them to achieve wealth, fame, love, brutality, murder, self-sacrifice. But don't ask them to achieve self-respect. They will hate your soul.