Quotes About Ayn Rand

There's so much nonsense about human inconstancy and the transience of all emotions. I've always thought that a feeling which changes never existed in the first place.

It is a sin to write this.

Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.

writing is serious business and not for any stray bastard that wants to try it.

Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes.

I think that when in doubt about the truth of an issue, it's safer and in better taste to select the least numerous of the adversaries.

The question of whether one alleges the Superiority or Inferiority of any given race is irrelevant; racism has only one psychological root: the racist's sense of his own Inferiority.

She wondered why she had never noticed that she did not know his name and why she had never asked him. Perhaps because she had known everything she had to know about him from that first glance.

You're so beautiful, Dominique. Its such a lovely accident on God's part that there's one person who matches inside and out.

A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort, or enslaves him, or attempts to limit the freedom of his mind, or compels him to act against his own rational judgment ... is not, strictly speaking, a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang-rule.

Life is a value to be bought and thinking is the only coin noble enough to buy it.

You could tell them why they should hire you so very much better than I could. But they won't listen to you and they'll listen to me. Because I'm the middleman. The shortest distance between two points is not a straight line--it's a middleman. And the more middlemen, the shorter. Such is the psychology of a pretzel.

It is a sin to think words no others think

That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call 'free will' is your mind's freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character.

That which exists possesses identity; he could keep it out of existence by refusing to identify it.

Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea. That presupposes the ability to think. Thinking is something one doesn't borrow or pawn.

sometimes, she felt pity for those countless nameless ones somewhere around them who, in a feverish quest, were searching for some answer, and in their search crushed others, perhaps even her; but she could not be crushed, for she had the answer.

Whenever anyone accuses some person of being 'unfeeling,' he means that that person is just. He means that that person has no causeless emotions and will not grant him a feeling which he does not deserve. He means that .'to feel' is to go against reason, against moral values, against reality.

It was useless to argue, she thought, and to wonder about people who would neither refute an argument nor accept it.

When I die, I hope to go to heaven-- whatever the hell that is-- and I want to be able to afford the price of admission, Virtue is the price of admission. Jim said haughtily. That's what I mean, James. So I want to be prepared to claim the greatest virtue of all-- that I was a man who made money. Any grafter can make money. James, you ought to discover some day that words have an exact meaning.

Man's mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

The basic purpose of art is not to teach, but to show—to hold up to man a concretized image of his nature and his place in the universe.

All public projects are mausoleums, not always in shape, but always in cost.

Reality is that which exists; the unreal does not exist; the unreal is merely that negation of existence which is the content of a human consciousness when it attempts to abandon reason. Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man's only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.