Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged Quotes
Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.
Whenever a man denounces the mind, it is because his goal is of a nature the mind would not permit him to confess.
Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life.
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.
Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.
I never found beauty in longing for the impossible and never found the possible to be beyond my reach.
Joy is the goal of existence, and joy is not to be stumbled upon, but to be achieved, and the act of treason is to let its vision drown in the swamp of the moment's torture.
To the extent to which a man is rational, life is the premise directing his actions. To the extent to which he is irrational, the premise directing his actions is death.
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.
Sacrifice is the surrender of that which you value in favor of which you dont
Sacrifice does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious
He walked, groping for a sentence that hung in his mind as an empty shape. He could neither fill it or dismiss it.
You know, I think that only if one feels immensely important can one feel truly light.
You always play it open, don’t you?” he asked.“I’ve never noticed you doing otherwise.”“I thought I was the only one who could afford to.
There is no escape from justice, nothing can be unearned and unpaid for in the universe, neither in matter nor in spirit—and if the guilty do not pay, then the innocent have to pay it.
No action could be lower or more futile than for one person to throw upon another the burden of his abdication of choice.
I win by means of nothing but logic and I surrender to nothing but logic. I do not surrender my reason or deal with men who surrender theirs.
...there was no guilt in his face, no doubt, nothing but the calm of an inviolate self-confidence.
Why yes, I can, ' said Midas Mulligan, when he was asked whether he could name a person more evil than the man with a heart closed to pity. 'The man who uses another's pity for him as a weapon.
The only thing that counts in life is solid, material assets. It's no time for theories when everything is falling to pieces around us.
I'm not asking you to do your best. I'm asking you to do your job." -Dagny Taggart
...she stood beside him, sagging in his arms, abandoning herself to anything he wished, in open acknowledgment of his power to reduce her to helplessness by the pleasure he had the power to give her.
...he had never known fear because, against any disaster, he had held the omnipotent cure of being able to act.
He saw for the first time that he had never known fear because, against any disaster, he had held the omnipotent cure of being able to act.
Throughout his life, whenever he became convinced that a course of action was right, the desire to follow it had come automatically.
She had been proved right so eloquently, she had thought, that comments were unnecessary.
Most people feel that they rise in their own eyes, if others want them.”“I feel that others live up to me, if they want me...
She lay on her back, looking up at the sky, feeling no desire to move or think or know that there was any time beyond this moment.
If it is now the belief of my fellow men, who call themselves the public, that their good requires victims, then I say: 'The public good be damned, I will have no part of it!
He knew that the dread in these men’s minds was not of the fact, but of his naming it—as if the fact had not existed, but his words held the power to make it exist.
Well, whose opinion did you take?”“I don’t ask for opinions.”“What do you go by?”“Judgment.”“Well, whose judgment did you take?”“Mine.”“But whom did you consult about it?”“Nobody.
...they want us to pretend that we see the world as they pretend they see it. They need some sort of sanction from us.
...man's life must be a straight line of motion from goal to farther goal, each leading to the next and to a single growing sum, like a journey...
It was the smile of a man who is able to see, to know and to create the glory of existence. It was the mocking, challenging smile of a brilliant intelligence.
This, in every hour and every issue, is your basic moral choice: thinking or non-thinking, existence or non-existence, A or non-A, entity or zero.
Logic rests on the axiom that existence exists. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification.
To exist is to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of non-existence, it is to be an entity of a specific nature made of specific attributes.
By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man—every man—is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.
Man has the power to act as his own destroyer—and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.
