Quotes from Ayn Rand

If I found a job, a project, an idea or a person I wanted—I'd have to depend on the whole world. Everything has strings leading to everything else. We're all so tied together. We're all in a net, the net is waiting, and we're pushed into it by one single desire.

You know, there's a thing that stumps me. You're the coldest man I know. And I can't understand why - knowing that you're actually a fiend in your quiet sort of way - why I always feel, when I see you, that you're the most life-giving person I've ever met.

Noticia es lo que excite más al mayor número de gente. Lo que les va a impresionar y dejar atontados. Cuanto más atontados, mejor, siempre que haya suficientes»

He was accustomed to hostility; this kind of benevolence was more offensive than hostility.

I made my money by my own effort, in free exchange and through the voluntary consent of every man I dealt with—the voluntary consent of those who employed me when I started, the voluntary consent of those who work for me now, the voluntary consent of those who buy my product.

of any achievements open to you, the one that makes all others possible is the creation of your own character.

You stood here and watched the storm with the greatest pride one can ever feel—because you are able to have summer flowers and half-naked women in your house on a night like this, in demonstration of your victory over that storm. And if it weren't for you, most of those who are here would be left helpless at the mercy of that wind in the middle of some such plain.

The punishment she had wanted to inflict on him was the torture of shame; what she had inflicted was the torture of boredom.

entonces los que se odian a sí mismos y los que odian la vida, sólo conciben una única forma equivalente al amor: la destrucción. Lillian lo había elegido por lo mejor de sus virtudes.

glassy rustle which was the East River somewhere close by

Una mente racional no trabaja bajo coerción; no subordina su comprensión de la realidad a las órdenes, las directivas o los controles de nadie; no sacrifica su conocimiento, su visión de la verdad, a las opiniones, las amenazas, los deseos, los planes o el «bienestar» de nadie.

It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment—on the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the verdict 'It is.

Its symptom is always an attempt to circumvent reality by substituting men for ideas, the man-made for the metaphysical, favors for rights, special pull for merit—i.e., an attempt to reduce man's life to a small back-yard (or rat hole) exempt from the absolutism of reason.

No importa que sólo unos pocos en cada generación comprendan y logren la realidad completa de la adecuada estatura humana y que el resto la traicione. Son esos pocos los que mueven al mundo y le dan su sentido a la vida, y son esos pocos a quienes siempre aspiré a dirigirme. El resto no me interesa; no es a mí o a El manantial a quien traicionarán: es a sus propias almas.   Ayn Rand Nueva

En la medida en que un hombre se guía por su juicio racional, actúa en concordancia con los requisitos de su naturaleza y, en esa medida, consigue una forma humana de supervivencia y bienestar; en la medida en que actúa de forma irracional, actúa como su propio destructor.

In a system of full capitalism, there should be (but, historically, has not yet been) a complete separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.

there comes a point, in the defeat of any man of virtue, when his own consent is needed for evil to win—and

So after centuries of being pounded with the doctrine that altruism is the ultimate ideal, men have accepted it in the only way it could be accepted. By seeking self-esteem through others. By living second-hand. And it has opened the way for every kind of horror. It has become the dreadful form of selfishness which a truly selfish man couldn't have conceived. And now, to cure a world perishing from selflessness, we're asked to destroy the self.

He was sixty years old; his backbone had been as straight as his gun; his spirit-as straight as his backbone.

Kant's expressly stated purpose was to save the morality of self-abnegation and self-sacrifice. He knew that it could not survive without a mystic base—and what it had to be saved from was reason.

Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality. But existence exists; reality is not to be wiped out, it will merely wipe out the wiper. By refusing to say 'It is,' you are refusing to say 'I am.

Vosotros, que carecéis de normas de estima propia, aceptáis la culpa y no os atrevéis a formular preguntas.

Debo recordarte también que el derecho a la vida es la fuente de la que manan todos los derechos, incluido el derecho de propiedad.

There was no action she could take against the men of undefined thought, of unnamed motives, of unstated purposes, of unspecified morality. There was nothing she could say to them—nothing would be heard or answered. What were the weapons, she thought, in a realm where reason was not a weapon any longer?