Quotes About Self-reliance

We're dealing with an entire generation of people who are absolutely committed to taking zero responsibility for their lives. Everything is somebody else's fault. Classic victim mentality. Don't worry, we'll clean up the mess for you. We'll pick up the check. We'll tip the waiter. You hear it day in and day out from the—

It is my conviction that we make ourselves who we want to be and not chain ourselves to the notions of busybodies who wish to judge us.

the poorest guide you can have in life is what people will say.

Muster your wits: stand in your own defense.

It took a lot of women like that, a lot of women who said I'm not going to do what you expect me to do, because you have no idea what I'm capable of. I'm going to get dirty and use tools and live the way I want to move the world forward.

I get to live by myself in a tree, doing some bullshit job for no one? This is my dream, Stevie. This is my dream.

I don't think a man can hurt another, not in any important way. Neither hurt him nor help him. I have really nothing to forgive you.

Don't you know that most people take most things because that's what's given them, and they have no opinion whatever? Do you wish to be guided by what they expect you to think they think or by your own judgment?

The first right on earth is the right of the ego. Man's first duty is to himself. His moral law is never to place his prime goal within the persons of others. His moral obligation is to do what he wishes, provided his wish does not depend primarily upon other men.

he does not achieve through other men nor for other men, he achieves through and for himself alone, then offers it to others.

Peter, before you can do things for people, you must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the secondary consequences. The work, not the people." (578)

My real soul...? It's real only when it's independent...

I think the only cardinal evil on earth is that of placing your prime concern within other men. I've always demanded a certain quality in the people I liked. I've always recognized it at once—and it's the only quality I respect in men. I chose my friends by that. Now I know what it is. A self-sufficient ego. Nothing else matters.

Dagny, he said, looking at the city as it moved past their taxi window, think of the first man who thought of making a steel girder. He knew what he saw, what he thought and what he wanted. He did not say, 'It seems to me,' and he did not take orders from those who say, 'In my opinion.

I think the only cardinal evil on earth is that of placing your primer concern within other men

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

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

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.

We will not deal with men on any terms but ours—and our terms are a moral code which holds that man is an end in himself and not the means to any end of others. We do not seek to force our code upon them. They are free to believe what they please.

The men I was fighting were impotent. The shiftless, the purposeless, the irresponsible, the irrational—it was not I who needed them, it was not theirs to dictate terms to me, it was not mine to obey demands.

courage and confidence are practical necessities, that courage is the practical form of being true to existence, of being true to truth, and confidence is the practical form of being true to one's own consciousness.

Roark, floating like a piece of driftwood, held a power greater than that of the engine in the belly of the yacht. Wynand thought: Because that is the power from which the engine has come.

All that which proceeds from man's independent ego is good. All that which proceeds from man's dependence upon men is evil.

Do you mean to tell me that you're thinking seriously of building that way, when and if you are an architect?" "Yes." "My dear fellow, who will let you?" "That's not the point. The point is, who will stop me?