Quotes from Ayn Rand

Never Consume more than you produce.

Why is it so important - what others have done? Why does it become sacred by the mere fact of not being your own? Why is anyone and everyone right - so long as it's not yourself? Why does the number of those others take the place of truth? Why is truth made a mere matter of arithmetic - and only of addition at that? Why is everything twisted out of all sense to fit everything else?

The walls are cracked and water runs upon them within threads without sound, black and glistening as blood.

The leaves had edges of silver that trembled and rippled like a river of green and fire flowing high above us.

We went on, cutting through the branches, and it was as if we were swimming through a sea of leaves, with the bushes as waves rising and falling and rising around us, and flinging their green sprays high to the treetops.

At a time like this, we can't afford the luxury of thinking!

He wondered whether he really liked his mother. But she was his mother and this fact was recognized by everybody as meaning automatically that he loved her, and so he took for granted that whatever he felt for her was love. He did not know whether there was any reason why he should respect her judgment. She was his mother; this was supposed to take the place of reasons.

The thinking child seeks equals; the conformist seeks protectors.

One falls in love with the embodiment of the values that formed a person's character, which are reflected in his widest goals or smallest gestures, which create the style of his soul—the individual style of a unique, unrepeatable, irreplaceable consciousness.

There is no necessity for pain-why, then, is the worst pain reserved for those who will not accept its necessity?

She looked slowly about her, noting every object and the reason for its presence.

And because she worshipped joy, Kira seldom laughed and did not go to see comedies in theaters. And because she felt a profound rebellion against the weighty, the tragic, the solemn, Kira had a solemn reverence for those songs of defiant gaiety.

Potentially, a government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.

Reason can be fought with reason. How are you going to fight the unreasonable?

One of the methods used by statists to destroy capitalism consists in establishing controls that tie a given industry hand and foot, making it unable to solve its problems, then declaring that freedom has failed and stronger controls are necessary."=Ayn Rand

The charming aspect of Christmas is the fact that it expresses good will in a cheerful, happy, benevolent, non-sacrificial way. One says: "Merry Christmas"—not "Weep and Repent." And the good will is expressed in a material, earthly form—by giving presents to one's friends, or by sending them cards in token of remembrance.

And now we look upon the earth and sky. This spread of naked rock and peaks and moonlight is like a world ready to be born, a world that waits. It seems to us it asks a sign from us, a spark, a first commandment. We cannot know what word we are to give, nor what great deed this earth expects to witness. We know it waits. It seems to say it has great gifts to lay before us. We are to speak. We are to give its goal, its highest meaning to all this glowing space of rock and sky.

Logic rests on the axiom that existence exists. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification.

It's a law of survival, isn't it?—to seek the best. I didn't come for your sake. I came for mine.

Wasn't it evil to wish without moving- or to move without aim?

It [ballet] projects a fragile kind of strength and a certain inflexible precision.

An artist reveals his naked soul in his work - and so, gentle reader, do you when you respond to it.

The unrecognized genius—that's an old story. Have you ever thought of a much worse one—the genius recognized too well? ... That a great many men are poor fools who can't see the best—that's nothing. One can't get angry at that. But do you understand about the men who see it and don't want it?

The only guilt of the victims, he thought, had been that they accepted it as guilt.