Quotes About Individualism

Of course I'm all right, professor. I had to be. A is A.- John Galt

So I want to be prepared to claim the greatest virtue of all—that I was a man who made money.

Keating felt naked...People were his protection against people. Roark had no sense of people. Others gave Keating a feeling of his own value. Roark gave him nothing.

I know what I want up to the age of two hundred. Know what you want in life and go after it. I worship individuals for their highest possibilities as individuals, and I loathe humanity, for its failure to live up to these possibilities.

Aren't you training a man who could become your most dangerous competitor?" "That's the only sort of men I like to hire. Dagny, have you lived too long among the looters? Have you come to think that one man's ability is a threat to another?" "Oh no! But I thought I was almost the only one left who didn't think that.

And I can find the joy only if I do my work in the best way possible to me. But the best is a matter of standards—and I set my own standards. I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition. I may, perhaps, stand at the beginning of one.

If a natural fact is neither just nor unjust, by what mental leap does it become a moral problem and an issue of justice? Why should those "favored by nature" be made to atone for what is not an injustice and is not of their making?

the usual looters' slogan of 'public welfare

If it is now the belief of my fellow men, who call themselves the public, that their good requires victims, then I say: The public good be damned, I will have no part of it!

Let us throw away our candles and our torches. Let us flood the cities with light. Let us bring a new light to men! -Equality 7-2521

And if this should lighten the toil of men, said Similarity 5-0306, then it is a great evil, for men have no cause to exist save in toiling for other men.

A free mind and a free economy are corollaries. One can't exist without the other.

All the giants of the spirit whom I've broken. I don't think anybody ever realized how much I enjoyed doing it. It's a kind of lust. I'm perfectly indifferent to slugs like Ellsworth Toohey or my friend Alvah, and quite willing to leave them in peace. But just let me see a man of a slightly higher dimension—and I've got to make a sort of Toohey out of him. I've got to. It's like a sex urge.

Just prove that a thing makes men happy—and you've damned it. That's how far we've come. We've tied happiness to guilt.

you've made a mistake already. By asking me. By asking anyone. Never ask people. Not about your work. Don't you know what you want?

One puts oneself above all and crushes everything in one's way to get the best for oneself.

they want us to pretend that we see the world as they pretend they see it. They need some sort of sanction from us.

why should you care what people will say? All you have to do is please yourself.

Until men learn that of all human symbols, Robin Hood is the most immoral and the most contemptible, there will be no justice on earth and no way for mankind to survive.

Why did you decide to be an architect?" "I didn't know it then. But it's because I've never believed in God.

Do not, however, make the error of reversing cause and effect: the good of the country was made possible precisely by the fact that it was not forced on anyone as a moral goal or duty; it was merely an effect; the cause was a man's right to pursue his own good. It is this right—not its consequences—that represents the moral justification of capitalism.

I do not care to be admired causelessly, emotionally, intuitively, instinctively—or blindly. I do not care for blindness in any form, I have too much to show—or for deafness, I have too much to say. I do not care to be admired by anyone's heart—only by someone's head.

It is forbidden, not to be happy. For, as it has been explained to us, men are free and the earth belongs to them; and all things on earth belong to all men; and the will of all men together is good for all; and so all men must be happy. Yet

But I don't think of you.