Quotes by Ayn Rand

It was a hymn with the force of a march, a march with the majesty of a hymn. It was the song of soldiers bearing sacred banners and of priests carrying swords. It was an anthem to the sanctity of strength.

The things you were talking about. The lights and the flowers. Do they expect those things to make them romantic, not the other way around?”“Darling, what do you mean?”“There wasn’t a person there who enjoyed it,” she said, her voice lifeless, “or who thought or felt anything at all. They moved about, and they said the same dull things they say anywhere. I suppose they thought the lights would make it brilliant.”“Darling, you take everything too seriously. One is not supposed to be intellectual at a ball. One is simply supposed to be gay.”“How? By being stupid?

Men who reject the responsibility of thought and reason can only exist as parasites on the thinking of others.

To irrational principles, one cannot be loyal. Ideas that are not derived from reality cannot be consistently practiced in reality.--as quoted by Leonard Peikoff in Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand

They say that it’s hard for men to agree. You’d be surprised how easy it is—when both parties hold as their moral absolute that neither exists for the sake of the other and that reason is their only means of trade.

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.

People said it because other people said it. They did not know why it was being said and heard everywhere. They did not give or ask for reasons. Reason, Dr. Pritchett had told them, is the most naive of all superstitions. The source of public opinion? said Claude Slagenhop in a public radio speech. There is no source of public opinion. It is spontaneously general. It is a reflex of the collective instinct of the collective mind.

But why should you care what people will say? All you have to do is please yourself.

Thought—he told himself quietly—is a weapon one uses in order to act. No action was possible. Thought is the tool by which one makes a choice. No choice was left to him. Thought sets one’s purpose and the way to reach it. In the matter of his life being torn piece by piece out of him, he was to have no voice, no purpose, no way, no defense.

And, after all, you’ve got to live.”“Not that way,” said Roark.

In a system of full capitalism, there should be (but, historically, has not yet been) a complete separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.

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 values. The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone.

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.

The practical implementation of friendship, affection and love consists of incorporating the welfare (the rational welfare) of the person involved into one’s own hierarchy of values, then acting accordingly.

When you are in love, it means that the person you love is of great personal, selfish importance to you and to your life.

You have sacrificed justice to mercy. You have sacrificed independence to unity. You have sacrificed reason to faith. You have sacrificed wealth to need. You have sacrificed self-esteem to self-denial. You have sacrificed happiness to duty.

I dont want to see you. I dont like you. I dont like your face. You look like an insufferable egotist. Youre impertinent. Youre too sure of yourself. Twenty years ago I would have punched your face with the greatest of pleasure.

Your ego is your strictest judge.

The egotist in the absolute sense is not the man who sacrifices others. He is the man who stands above the need of using others in any manner. He does not function through them. He is not concerned with them in any primary matter. Not in his aim, not in his motive, not in his thinking, not in his desires, not in the source of his energy. He does not exist for any other man—and he asks no other man to exist for him.

I think the only cardinal evil on earth is that of placing your prime concern within other men. I’ve always demanded a certain quality in the people I liked. I’ve always recognized it at once—and it’s the only quality I respect in men. I chose my friends by that...A self-sufficient ego. Nothing else matters.