“The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.”
— Ayn Rand
“Freedom: To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.”
“Learn to value yourself, which means: fight for your happiness.”
“Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists. It is real. It is possible. It’s yours.”
“A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.”
“You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.”
“If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing.”
“The truth is not for all men but only for those who seek it.”
“Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea.”
“The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone.”
“The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.”
“The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see.”
“I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”
“I could die for you. But I couldn't, and wouldn't, live for you.”
“Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.”
“To say "I love you" one must know first how to say the "I".”
“Never think of pain or danger or enemies a moment longer than is necessary to fight them.”
“A government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.”
“Who is John Galt?”
“Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind. ”
“Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.”
“Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision.”
“The world you desire can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.”
“A man’s ego is the fountainhead of human progress.”
“Action without thought is mindlessness, and thought without action is hypocritical.”
“My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”
“Anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today.”
“An individualist is a man who says: ‘I will not run anyone’s life – nor let anyone run mine. I will not rule or be ruled. I will not be a master nor a slave. I will not sacrifice myself to anyone – nor sacrifice anyone to myself.’”
“Don’t think. Believe. Trust your heart, not your brain. Don’t think. Feel. Believe.”
“Love is not self-sacrifice, but the most profound assertion of your own needs and values. It is for your own happiness that you need the person you love, and that is the greatest compliment, the greatest tribute you can pay to that person.”
“Men who reject the responsibility of thought and reason can only exist as parasites on the thinking of others.”
“But I don’t think of you. – Howard Roark.”
“There’s nothing of any importance in life-except how well you do your work.”
“I refuse to apologize for my ability – I refuse to apologize for my success – I refuse to apologize for my money. If this is evil, make the most of it.”
“There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.”
“When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit.”
“My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose.”
“Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men’s stupidity, but your talent to their reason.”
“A rational man is guided by his thinking – by a process of Reason – not by his feelings and desires.”
“Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.”
“In the temple of his spirit, each man is alone.”
“If you know that this life is all that you have, wouldn’t you make the most of it?”
“Rationality is the recognition of the fact that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it.”
“It’s not that I don’t suffer, it’s that I know the unimportance of suffering. I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one’s soul and as a permanent scar across one’s view of existence.”
“Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter.”
“She did not know the nature of her loneliness. The only words that named it were: This is not the world I expected.”
“Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by fraud.”
“Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority.”
“I am interested in politics only in order to secure and protect freedom.”
“This god, this one word: I.”
“You love people, not for what you do for them or what they do for you. You love them for their values; their virtues.”
“Words are a lens to focus one’s mind.”
“Life is the reward of virtue. And happiness is the goal and reward of life.”
“I’m not brave enough to be a coward; I see the consequences too clearly.”
“When you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice, you may know that your society is doomed.”
“Rationalization is a process of not perceiving reality, but of attempting to make reality fit one’s emotions.”
“Man’s basic vice, the source of all his evils, is the act of unfocusing his mind, the suspension of his consciousness, which is not blindness, but the refusal to see, not ignorance, but the refusal to know.”
“Serenity comes from the ability to say “Yes” to existence. Courage comes from the ability to say “No” to the wrong choices made by others.”
“In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.”
“An inventor is a man who asks ‘Why?’ of the universe and lets nothing stand between the answer and his mind.”
“Because I never have any definite destination. This ship is not for going to places, but for getting away from them. When I stop at a port, it’s only for the sheer pleasure of leaving it. I always think: here’s one more place that can’t hold me.”
“A quest for self-respect is proof of its lack.”
“If you tell an ugly woman that she is beautiful, you offer her the great homage of corrupting the concept of beauty.”
“The evasion of responsibility is the major cause of most peoples frustrations and defeats.”
“A man who seeks escape from the responsibility of supporting his life by his own thought and effort, and wishes to survive by conquering, ruling and exploiting others, is NOT an Individualist.”
“The creed of sacrifice is a morality for the immoral.”
“Guilt is altruism’s stock in trade, and the inducing of guilt is its only means of self-perpetuati on.”
“The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.”
“Honest people are never touchy about the matter of being trusted.”
“Capitalism and altruism are incompatible; they are philosophical opposites; they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society.”
“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.”
“Love is our response to our highest values.”
“I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle.”
“If you don’t know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn.”
“The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow.”
“I take no pride in hopeless longing; I wouldn’t hold a stillborn aspiration. I’d want to have it, to make it, to live it.”
“Men prosper or fail, survive or perish in proportion to the degree of their rationality.”
“The conservatives want to rule man’s consciousness; the liberals, his body.”
“What greater wealth is there than to own your life and to spend it on growing? Every living thing must grow. It can’t stand still. It must grow or perish.”
“The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.”
“To fear to face an issue is to believe that the worst is true.”
“Capitalism was the only system in history where wealth was not acquired by looting, but by production, not by force, but by trade, the only system that stood for man’s right to his own mind, to his work, to his life, to his happiness, to himself.”
“People are not embracing collectivism because they have accepted bad economics. They are accepting bad economics because they have embraced collectivism.”
“A building has integrity, just as a man and just as seldom! It must be true to its own idea, have its own form, and serve its own purpose!”
“A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race – and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin.”
“Through all the darkness, through all the shame of which men are capable, the spirit of man will remain alive on this earth. It may sleep, but it will awaken. It may wear chains, but it will break through.”
“From the smallest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from one attribute of man – the function of his reasoning mind.”
“All the evils, abuses, and iniquities, popularly ascribed to businessmen and to capitalism, were not caused by an unregulated economy or by a free market, but by government intervention into the economy.”
“You have no choice about your capacity to feel that something is good for you or evil, but what you will consider good or evil, what will give you joy or pain, what you will love or hate, desire or fear, depends on your standard of value.”
“There can be no justification for choosing any part of that which one knows to be evil.”
“A man’s rights are not violated by a private individual’s refusal to deal with him.”
“There is no such dichotomy as ‘human rights’ versus ‘property rights.’ No human rights can exist without property rights.”
“The first society in history whose leaders were neither Attilas nor Witch Doctors, a society led, dominated and created by the Producers, was the United States of America.”
“One can’t love man without hating most of the creatures who pretend to bear his name.”
“Whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man’s nature and of life’s potential.”
“The only thing that matters my goal my reward my beginning my end is the work itself. My work done my way. A private personal selfish egotistical motivation. That’s the only way I function. That’s all I am.”
“He never felt lonliness except when he was happy.”
“The moral absolute should be: if and when, in any dispute, one side initiates the use of physical force, that side is wrong – and no consideration or discussion of the issues is necessary or appropriate.”
“The men who are not interested in philosophy need it most urgently; they are most helplessly in its power.”
“This was the great clarity of being beyond emotion, after the reward of having felt everything one could feel.”
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