Quotes from Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

We are born into this world unarmed - our mind is our only weapon.

I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle.

I never found beauty in longing for the impossible and never found the possible to be beyond my reach.

Joy is the goal of existence, and joy is not to be stumbled upon, but to be achieved, and the act of treason is to let its vision drown in the swamp of the moment's torture.

I think, therefore I'll think.

You know, I think that only if one feels immensely important can one feel truly light.

The view that man was ever to be drawn by some vision of the unattainable shining ahead, doomed ever to aspire, but not to achieve, my life and my values could not bring me to that.

By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man—every man—is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.

Man has the power to act as his own destroyer—and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.

Reason is your means of survival — so that for you, who are a human being, the question 'to be or not to be' is the question 'to think or not to think..'.

The anti-mind is the anti-life.

Do not cry that it is our duty to serve you. We do not recognize such duty. Do not cry that you need us. We do not consider need a claim. Do not cry that you own us. You don't.

Do it first and feel about it afterwards.' - Dagny Taggart

Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.

It was the smile of a man who is able to see, to know and to create the glory of existence. It was the mocking, challenging smile of a brilliant intelligence.

He did not know that he was expected to attempt to buy his way into society and that they anticipated the pleasure of rejecting him. He had no time to notice their disappointment.

...there can be no justification for a society in which a man is expected to manufacture the weapons for his own murderers.

Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life.

Why yes, I can, ' said Midas Mulligan, when he was asked whether he could name a person more evil than the man with a heart closed to pity. 'The man who uses another's pity for him as a weapon.

Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplacable spark. In the hopeless swamps of the not quite, the not yet, and the not at all, do not let the hero in your soul perish and leave only frustration for the life you deserved, but never have been able to reach. The world you desire can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.

Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing buy rational actions.

He was guilty of nothing, except that he earned his own fortune and never forgot that it was his.

Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by fraud.