Quotes About Individualism

He thought...that man's work should be a higher step, an improvement on nature, not a degradation. He did not want to despise men; he wanted to love and admire them.

Ni la vida ni la felicidad pueden lograrse persiguiendo caprichos irracionales.

beauty. Let's surpass them all! Let's throw their sweat in their face. Let's destroy them at one stroke. Let's be gods. Let's be ugly.

Dotados de juicio para actuar, no se nos admitirá un acto de propia elección. Trabajaremos bajo disposiciones y controles promulgados por quienes son incapaces de producir nada.

Si existen grados de maldad, resulta difícil definir cuál es el más despreciable: si el bruto que asume el derecho a forzar la mente de otros, o el degenerado moral que ofrece a otros el derecho a forzar su mente.

Una moralidad que se atreva a deciros que obtendréis la felicidad en la renunciación a vuestra dicha, que valoréis aquélla por el fracaso de vuestros valores, es una insolente negación de la moralidad.

Estamos en huelga contra el martirio y contra el código moral que lo exige, contra quienes creen que uno debe existir sólo para beneficiar a otros y contra esa moral de caníbales, tanto si se practica de un modo material como espiritual.

Into what bottomless, future-less sewer of the unpaid-for? Here, we trade achievements, not failures - values, not needs. We're free of one another, yet we all grow together. Wealth, Dagny? What greater wreath is there than to own your life and to spend it on growing? Everyone living thing must grow. It can't stand still. It must grow or perish.

Can you rule a thinking man? We don't want any thinking men.

Usted no quiere que piense. Cuando fuerza a un hombre a actuar contra su placer y a su juicio, es su pensamiento el que desea suprimir. Anhela convertirlo en un robot. Pues bien, obraré de acuerdo con esto.

Have you always liked being Howard Roark?" Roark smiled. The smile was amused, astonished, involuntarily contemptuous.

Every man worth calling a man lives for himself. The one who doesn't—doesn't live at all.

Hank Rearden is the kind of man who sticks his name on everything he touches. You may, from this, form your own opinion about the character of Hank Rearden.

El camino queda expedito -dijo-. Hemos de regresar al mundo. Y levantando la mano sobre la desolada tierra, trazó en el espacio el signo del dólar.

his convictions to the wishes of others, be it the whole

There is no such thing as 'the public interest' except as the sum of the interests of individual men. And the basic, common interest of all men—all rational men—is freedom. Freedom is the first requirement of 'the public interest'—not what men do when they are free, but that they are free. All their achievements rest on that foundation—and cannot exist without it.

One man can stop the motor of the world.

Do we consider that anything goes, that we have no responsibility towards others but only for satisfying our needs? Well, that is the crux of the great novels xxx - the question of doing what is right or what we want to do.

He was an American character, one typical of men of his generation, men who embraced the notion of freedom and individualism and the open road without always knowing its price, and whose enthusiasms could as easily lead to the cowardice of McCarthyism as to the heroics of World War II. Men who were both dangerous and promising precisely because of their fundamental innocence; men prone, in the end, to disappointment.

This dual sense of individual advancement and collective decline that I thought accounted for some of the most troubling attitudes I heard in some conversations.

Our individualism has always been bound by a set of communal values, the glue upon which every healthy society depends.

A literate society depends on three things: culture, communication, and choice. One could add that culture is also faith and morality, that communication is also social interaction and equality, and that choice is both individualism and political action.

In today's world, other people have become an obstacle to our individual pursuits.

La gran ventaja de este pensamiento positivo al estilo americano es que uno puede contar con que sean las personas quienes se lo impongan a sí mismas. Los regímenes estalinistas tenían que apoyarse en el aparato del Estado (escuelas, policía secreta, etcétera) para imponer el optimismo, pero las democracias capitalistas confían en el mercado para que les haga el trabajo.