Quotes About Ayn Rand

The feeblest imbecile should be able to see the glaring contradictions in every one of your statements." "Let us put it this way, Dr. Stadler. The man who doesn't see that, deserves to believe all my statements.

No man can predict the time when others will choose to return to reason.

It was as if normal existence were a photograph of shapeless things in badly printed colors, but this was a sketch done in a few sharp strokes that made things seem clean, important—and worth doing.

The only proper, moral purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence—to protect his right to his own life, to his own liberty, to his own property and to the pursuit of his own happiness. Without property rights, no other rights are possible.

mind, Miss Taggart? My mind is not on the market any longer.

It's not death that we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to live.

justice has not ceased to exist. How could it? It is possible for men to abandon their sight of it, and then it is justice that destroys them. But it is not possible for justice to go out of existence, because one is an attribute of the other, because justice is the act of acknowledging that which exists. . .

Thought - he told himself quietly - is a weapon one uses in order to act. No action was possible. Thought is the tool by which one makes a choice. No choice was left to him. Thought sets one's purpose and the way to reach it. In the matter of his life being torn piece by piece out of him, he was to have no voice, no purpose, no way, no defense.

You're unbearably conceited, was one of the two sentences she heard throughout her childhood, even though she never spoke of her own ability. The other sentence was: You're selfish. She asked what was meant, but never received an answer. She looked at the adults, wondering how they could imagine that she would feel guilt from an undefined accusation.

a very costly simplicity, one can notice, but not the elegance of a woman who gives much thought to her clothes; rather that of one who knows she can make any rag attractive and does it unconsciously." Excerpt From: Ayn Rand. "Night of January 16th.

the first word of 'Free, scientific inquiry' was redundant. He seems to have forgotten it. Well, I'll just say that 'Governmental scientific inquiry' is a contradiction in terms.

He telephoned half an hour ago. Mr. Gail Wynand.

Instead of prosperity, socialism has brought economic paralysis and/or collapse to every country that tried it. The degree of socialization has been the degree of disaster. The consequences have varied accordingly.

Held motionless by wonder, she stood looking at him, taking this moment, not in the name of the present, but as a salute to their past.

What if you're placing your virtue in the service of evil and letting it become a tool for the destruction of everything you love, respect and admire?

The punishment she had wanted to inflict on him was the torture of shame; what she had inflicted was the torture of boredom.

entonces los que se odian a sí mismos y los que odian la vida, sólo conciben una única forma equivalente al amor: la destrucción. Lillian lo había elegido por lo mejor de sus virtudes.

glassy rustle which was the East River somewhere close by

It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment—on the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the verdict 'It is.

In a system of full capitalism, there should be (but, historically, has not yet been) a complete separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.

Because they're a bunch of miserable children who struggle to remain alive, desperately and very badly, while I—I don't even notice the burden.

One can't love man without hating most of the creatures who pretend to bear his name. It's one or the other. One doesn't love God and sacrilege impartially.

If a man dies fighting for his own freedom, it is not a sacrifice: he is not willing to live as a slave; but it is a sacrifice to the kind of man who's willing.

The power of ideas has no reality for either of them, and neither cares to learn that the proof of that power lies in his own chronic sense of guilt and terror.