Authors — Quotes

Ayn Rand Quotes: 54

The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me.
The ladder of success is best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity.
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.
Atlas Shrugged
If you don't know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn.
Atlas Shrugged
Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values.
Learn to value yourself, which means: fight for your happiness.
I could die for you. But I couldn't, and wouldn't, live for you.
The Fountainhead
Freedom (n.): To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.
The Fountainhead
When I die, I hope to go to Heaven, whatever the Hell that is.
Why do they always teach us that it's easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It's the hardest thing in the world--to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want.
The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
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.
Atlas Shrugged
He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see.
My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose.
Anthem
The truth is not for all men but only for those who seek it.
Devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality; there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.
Atlas Shrugged
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.
Atlas Shrugged
To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That's what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul - would you understand why that's much harder?
The Fountainhead
Who is John Galt?
Atlas Shrugged
I never found beauty in longing for the impossible and never found the possible to be beyond my reach.
Atlas Shrugged
I love you so much that nothing can matter to me - not even you...Only my love- not your answer. Not even your indifference
The Fountainhead
I think, therefore I'll think.
Atlas Shrugged: 35th Anniversary Edition
Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life.
Atlas Shrugged
Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?
I can accept anything, except what seems to be the easiest for most people: the half-way, the almost, the just-about, the in-between.
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.
Atlas Shrugged
Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.
Atlas Shrugged
I do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and I do not live in chronic dread of disaster. It is no happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that I regard as the abnormal exception in Human Life.
Atlas Shrugged
Well, I always know what I want. And when you know what you want--you go toward it. Sometimes you go very fast, and sometimes only an inch a year. Perhaps you feel happier when you go fast. I don't know. I've forgotten the difference long ago, because it really doesn't matter, so long as you move.
We the Living
Anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today.
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.
We are born into this world unarmed - our mind is our only weapon.
Atlas Shrugged
Every form of happiness if one, every desire is driven by the same motor--by our love for a single value, for the highest potentiality of our own existence--and every achievement is an expression of it.
Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman's tool is values; the bureaucrat's tool is fear.
People, he thought, were as hungry for a sight of joy as he had always been--for a moment's relief from that gray load of suffering which seemed so inexplicable and unnecessary. He had never been able to understand why men should be unhappy.
Atlas Shrugged
What in hell are you really made of, Howard? After all, it's only a building. It's not the combination of holy sacrament, Indian torture, and sexual ecstasy that you seem to make of it." "Isn't it?
The Fountainhead
An attempt to achieve the good by force is like an attempt to provide a man with a picture gallery at the price of cutting out his eyes.
You know, I think that only if one feels immensely important can one feel truly light.
Atlas Shrugged
Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade...
Atlas Shrugged
An inventor is a man who asks 'Why?' of the universe and lets nothing stand between the answer and his mind.
A moment or an eternity—did it matter? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist.
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.
And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride. This god, this one word: 'I.
The view that man was ever to be drawn by some vision of the unattainable shining ahead, doomed ever to aspire, but not to achieve, my life and my values could not bring me to that.
Atlas Shrugged
Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration.
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.
A culture is made — or destroyed — by its articulate voices.
Aristotle may be regarded as the cultural barometer of Western history. Whenever his influence dominated the scene, it paved the way for one of history's brilliant eras; whenever it fell, so did mankind.
Whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man's nature and of life's potential.
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.