Ayn Rand
Many words have been granted me, and some are wise, and some are false, but only three are holy: "I will it!Collection: Wise
Self respect is something that can't be killed. The worst thing is to kill a man's pretense at it.Collection: Men
and he said her name to fill the space of five years.Collection: Years
Guilt is a rope that wears thin.Collection: Guilt
Integrity is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your consciousness, just as honesty is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake existence.Collection: Honesty
Let us destroy, but don't let us pretend that we are commiting an act of virtue.Collection: Virtue
whose steps were a restless substitute for flight.Collection: Steps
Place nothing above the verdict of your own mind.Collection: Mind
There is no such thing as a lousy job - only lousy men who don't care to do it.Collection: Inspirational
She started off, walking fast, as if the speed of her steps could give form to the things she felt.Collection: Giving
Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants.Collection: Men
Do it first and feel about it afterwards.' - Dagny TaggartCollection: Firsts
I loathe your ideals because I know no worse injustice than the giving of the undeserved.Collection: Giving
I dont work with collectives. I don't consult, i don't co-operate, I don't collaborate.Collection: Collectives
It is a sin to write this.Collection: Writing
Sacrifice is the surrender of that which you value in favor of which you dontCollection: Sacrifice
The doctrine that 'human rights' are superior to 'property rights' simply means that some human beings have the right to make property out of others.Collection: Mean
They proclaim that every man is entitled to exist without labor and, the laws of reality to the contrary notwithstanding, is entitled to receive his 'minimum sustenance' his food, his clothes, his shelter with no effort on his part, as his due and his birthright. To receive it from whom.Collection: Reality
An emotion is an automatic response, an automatic effect of man's value premises. An effect, not a cause. There is no necessary clash, no dichotomy between man's reason and his emotionsCollection: Men
I refuse to accept as guilt the fact of my own existence.Collection: Guilt
The right of a nation to determine its own form of government does not include the right to establish a slave society (that is, to legalize the enslavement of some men by others). There is no such thing as "the right to enslave." A nation can do it, just as a man can become a criminal- but neither can do it by right.Collection: Men
A man's rights are not violated by a private individual's refusal to deal with him.Collection: Men
At first, man was enslaved by the gods. But he broke their chains. Then he was enslaved by the kings. But he broke their chains. He was enslaved by his birth, by his kin, by his race. But he broke their chains. He declared to all his brothers that a man has rights which neither god nor king nor other men can take away from him, no matter what their number, for his is the right of man, and there is no right on earth above this right. And he stood on the threshold of freedom for which the blood of the centuries behind him had been spilled.Collection: Brother
If men want to oppose war, it is statism that they must oppose.Collection: War
To love is to value. Only a rationally selfish man, a man of self esteem, is capable of love - because he is the only man capable of holding firm, consistent, uncompromising, unbetrayed value. The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyoneCollection: Selfish
Live a life as a monument to your soul.Collection: Life
The quickest way to kill the human spirit is to ask someone to do mediocre work.Collection: Business
...If peace were the goal of today's intellectuals, a failure of that magnitude -- and the evidence of unspeakable suffering on so large a scale -- would make them pause and check their statist premises. Instead, blind to everything but their hatred for capitalism, they are now asserting that 'poverty breeds wars' ... But the question is: What breeds poverty? If you look a the world of today and if you look back at history, you will see the answer: the degree of a country's freedom is the degree of its prosperity.Collection: Country
Freedom, in a political context, means freedom from government coercion. It does not mean freedom from the landlord, from the employer, or freedom from the laws of nature which do not provide men with automatic prosperity. It means freedom from the coercive power of the state ' and nothing elseCollection: Mean
It is a policeman’s duty to retrieve stolen property and return it to its owners. But when robbery becomes the purpose of the law, and the policeman’s duty becomes, not protection, but the plunder of property - then it is an outlaw who has to become a policeman.Collection: Law
To deal with men by force is as impractical as to deal with nature by persuasion.Collection: Men
If you tell an ugly woman that she is beautiful, you offer her the great homage of corrupting the concept of beauty.Collection: Beautiful
Rationality is the recognition of the fact that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it.Collection: Philosophy
So you think that money is the root of all evil? [...] Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?Collection: Money
Since nature does not endow all men with equal beauty or equal intelligence, and the faculty of volition leads men to make different choices, the egalitarians propose to abolish the "unfairness" of nature and of volition, and to establish universal equality in fact - in defiance of facts. It is not equality before the law that they seek, but inequality: the establishment of an inverted social pyramid, with a new aristocracy on top - the aristocracy of non-value.Collection: Equality
The purpose of the law is not to prevent a future offense, but to punish the one actually committed.Collection: Law
A majority vote is not an epistemological validation of an idea. Voting is merely a proper political device--within a strictly, constitutionall y delimited sphere of action--for choosing the practical means of implementing a society’s basic principles. But those principles are not determined by vote.Collection: Mean
The ' pleasure' of being drunk is obviously the pleasure of escaping from the responsibility of Consciousness.Collection: Responsibility
Altruism does not mean mere kindness or generosity, but the sacrifice of the best among men to the worst, the sacrifice of virtues to flaws, of ability to incompetence, of progress to stagnation-and the subordinating of all life and of all values to the claims of anyone's suffering.Collection: Kindness
The world you desire can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.Collection: Travel
If [people] place such things as friendship and family ties above their own productive work, yes, then they are immoral. Friendship, family life and human relationships are not primary in a man's life. A man who places others first, above his own creative work, is an emotional parasite.Collection: Men
... reason accepts no commandments.Collection: Fear
Romantic art is the fuel and the spark plug of a Man's soul. It's task is to set a soul on fire and never let it go out.Collection: Art
Contrary to the ecologists, nature does not stand still and does not maintain the kind of equilibrium that guarantees the survival of any particular species - least of all the survival of her greatest and most fragile product: man.Collection: Men
Only the man who extols the purity of love devoid of desire, is capable of the depravity of a desire devoid of love.Collection: Men
Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy--a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but of using your mind's fullest power, not the joy of faking reality, but of achieving values that are real, not the joy of a drunkard, but of a producer.Collection: Happiness
Men have died in torture chambers, on the stake, in concentration camps, in front of firing squads, rather than renounce their convictions. The appeaser renounces his under the pressure of a frown on a vacant face.Collection: Men
When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion...th at in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing-you may know that your society is doomed.Collection: Men
A culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiate d masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.Collection: Men