Ayn Rand Quotes

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“Self respect is something that can't be killed. The worst thing is to kill a man's pretense at it.”

“In this world, either you're virtuous or you enjoy yourself. Not both, lady, not both.”

“One loses everything when one loses one's sense of humor.”

“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.”

“Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.”

“Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be left waiting for us in our graves-or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.”

“Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone.”

“Within the extent of your knowledge, you are right.”

“But you see, the measure of hell you're able to endure is the measure of your love.”

“Never ask people about your work.”

“He liked to observe emotions; they were like red lanterns strung along the dark unknown of another's personality, marking vulnerable points.”

“I don't wish to be the symbol of anything. I'm only myself.”

“She thought how strange it would be if she ever said 'Hello' to him. One did not greet oneself each morning.”

“What is morality, she asked.
Judgement to distinguish right and wrong, vision to see the truth, and courage to act upon it, dedication to that which is good, integrity to stand by the good at any price.”

“Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's individual value-judgments.”

“The most depraved type of human being… (is) the man without a purpose.”

“It is not advisable to venture unsolicited opinions. You should spare yourself the embarrassing discovery of their exact value to your listener.”

“Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants.”

“Is it advisable to spread out all the conveniences of culture before people to whom a few steps up a stair to a library is a sufficient deterrent from reading?”

“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.”

“The man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.”

“Every form of happiness is private. Our greatest moments are personal, self-motivated, not to be touched".”

“It was the greatest sensation of existence: not to trust but to know.”

“A viler evil than to murder a man, is to sell him suicide as an act of virtue.”

“In a free society, one does not have to deal with those who are irrational. One is free to avoid them.”

“For the first time since her return, she felt pain, a violent pain, but it made her feel alive, because it was worth feeling.”

“Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.”

“If one doesn't respect oneself one can have neither love nor respect for others.”

“But there are people who'll try to hurt you through the good they see in you--knowing that it's the good, needing it and punishing you for it. Don't let it break you when you discover that.”

“People want nothing but mirrors around them. To reflect them while they’re reflecting too… Reflections of reflections and echoes of echoes. No beginning and no end. No center and no purpose.”

“There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.”

“Don't think. Believe. Trust your heart, not your brain. Don't think. Feel. Believe.”

“No speech is ever considered, but only the speaker. It's so much easier to pass judgement on a man than on an idea.”

“Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.”

“The worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt.”

“Toohey: "Mr. Roark, we're alone here. Why don't you tell me what you think of me? In any words you wish. No one will hear us."
Roark: "But I don't think of you.”

“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.”

“I don't want to see you. I don't like you. I don't like your face. You look like an insufferable egotist. You're impertinent. You're too sure of yourself. Twenty years ago I would have punched your face with the greatest of pleasure.”

“I think. I am. I will.”

“Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.”

“Worry is a waste of emotional reserve".”

“A rational man never distorts or corrupts his own standards and judgment in order to appeal to the irrationality, stupidity, or dishonesty of others.”

“Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer—and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.”

“The more you learn, the more you know that you know nothing.”

“There are no evil thoughts except one; the refusal to think.”

“Thousands of years ago the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burnt at the stake he'd taught his brothers to light, but he left them a gift they had not conceived and he lifted darkness from the face of the Earth.”

“Do it first and feel about it afterwards.' - Dagny Taggart”

“We are all brothers under the skin - and I, for one, would be willing to skin humanity to prove it.”

“every man is free to rise as far as he's able or willing, but the degree to which he thinks determines the degree to which he'll rise.”