Quotes About Self-reliance

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.

Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it... John Galt

We wish to be damned with you, rather than blessed with all our brothers. Do

I owe nothing to my brothers, nor do I gather debts from them. I ask none to live for me, nor do I live for any others. I covet no man's soul, nor is my soul theirs to covet.

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...A self-sufficient ego. Nothing else matters.

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.

Our first rule here...is that one must always see for oneself.

Look," said Roark evenly, and pointed at the window. "Can you see the campus and the town? Do you see how many men are walking and living down there? Well, I don't give a damn what any or all of them think about architecture—or about anything else, for that matter. Why should I consider what their grandfathers thought of it?

It is here, it exists—but one must enter it naked and alone, with no rags from the falsehoods of centuries, with the purest clarity of mind—not an innocent heart, but that which is much rarer: an intransigent mind—as one's only possession and key.

No olvides que el estado natural del hombre es una postura erguida, una mente intransigente y un paso vivaz capaz de recorrer caminos ilimitados. No permitas que se extinga tu fuego, chispa a chispa, cada una de ellas irremplazable, en los pantanos sin esperanza de lo aproximado, lo casi, lo no aún, lo nunca jamás. No permitas que perezca el héroe que llevas en tu alma, en solitaria frustración por la vida que merecías pero que nunca pudiste alcanzar.

Don't you know....don't you know that there are things, in the best of us, which no outside hand should dare touch? Things sacred because, and only because, one can say: 'This is mine'? Don't you know that we live only for ourselves, the best of us do, those who are worthy of it? Don't you know that there is something in us which must not be touched by any state, by any collective, by any number of the millions?

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.

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 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!

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. Your own action, not any possible object of your charity.

Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth—the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with

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?

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

You will not enter it until you learn that you do not need to convince or to conquer the world. When you learn it, you will see that through all the years of your struggle, nothing had barred you from Atlantis and there were no chains to hold you, except the chains you were willing to wear. Through all those years, that which you most wished to win was waiting for you...waiting as unremittingly as you were fighting, as passionately, as desperately—but with a greater certainty than yours.

When you suspend your faculty of independent judgment, you suspend consciousness. To stop consciousness is to stop life.

But I don't think of you.

I could die for you. But I couldn't and wouldn't live for you.