Quotes from Ayn Rand

No hay nada que pueda arrebatar a un hombre su libertad, salvo otros hombres.

Keating leaned back with a sense of warmth and well-being. He liked this book. It had made the routine of his Sunday morning breakfast a profound spiritual experience; he was certain that it was profound, because he didn't understand it.

As she looked at him, her dark gray eyes went slowly from astonishment to stillness, then to a strange expression that resembled a look of weariness, except that it seemed to reflect much more than the endurance of this one moment.

the penalizing of ability for being ability, the penalizing of success for being success, and the sacrifice of productive genius to the demands of envious mediocrity.

There is a morality of reason, a morality proper to man, and Man's Life is its standard of value. All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys it is the evil.

So long as a road lies before us, and what care we if we must travel it alone!

if this boat were sinking, I'd give my life to save you. Not because it's any kind of duty. Only because I like you, for reasons and standards of my own. I could die for you. But I couldn't and wouldn't live for you.

Anyone else would have taken a job in an

We look upon our hands. We see the dust of centuries, the dust which hid great secrets and perhaps great evils. And yet it stirs no fear within our heart, but only silent reverence and pity.

What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" Ellsworth asked: "Then, in order to be truly wealthy, a man should collect souls?

And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride. This god, this one word: I.

Nature is not to be conquered, man is.

Jim, I studied engineering in college. When I see things, I see them.

Do you think nobody would willingly entrust his children to you and pay you for teaching them? Why do you have to extort your fees and collect your pupils by compulsion?

Don't fool yourself, my dear. You're much worse than a saint. You're a bitch.

The faces stood out, separate, lonely, no two alike. Behind each, there were the years of a life lived or half over, effort, hope and an attempt, honest or dishonest, but an attempt. It had left on all a single mark in common: on lips smiling with malice, on lips loose with renunciation, on lips tight with uncertain dignity—on all—the mark of suffering.

There is only one kind of men who have never been on strike in human history. Every other kind and class have stopped, when they so wished, and have presented demands to the world, claiming to be indispensable—except the men who have carried the world on their shoulders, have kept it alive, have endured torture as sole payment, but have never walked out on the human race.

An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.

She drove fast, as a matter of habit, an even speed without a sense of haste.

The shortest distance between two points is not a straight line—it's a middleman. And the more middlemen, the shorter.

Whenever a man denounces the mind, it is because his goal is of a nature the mind would not permit him to confess.

This was reality, she thought, this sense of clear outlines, of purpose, of lightness, of hope.

the vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your existence.

Let's stop and think for a moment. Is sacrifice a virtue? Can a man sacrifice his integrity? His honor? His freedom? His ideal? His convictions? The honesty of his feeling? The independence of his thought?