Ayn Rand Quotes

To be able to say "I love you", one has to be able to say "I

...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.

I have yet to see a genius or a hero who, if stuck with a burning match, would feel less pain than his undistinguished average brother.

The unrecognized genius-that's one old story. Have you ever thought of a much worse one-the genius recognized too well?

It [ballet] projects a fragile kind of strength and a certain inflexible precision.

It [ballet] is a perfect medium for the expression of spiritual love.

A gracefully effortless floating, flowing and flying are the essentials of the ballet’s image of man.

This is pity, ” he thought, and then he lifted his head in wonder. He thought that there must be something terribly wrong with a world in which this monstrous feeling is called a virtue.

You can fake virtue for an audience. You can’t fake it in your own eyes. Your ego is your strictest judge. They run from it. They spend their lives running.

...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.

No man can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation, an unrewarded duty or an involuntary servitude on another man.There can be no such thing as " the right to enslave .

I take the only desire one can really permit oneself. Freedom, Alvah, freedom.”“You call that freedom?”“To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.

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...

Everything that isn't permitted by The Law is forbidden.

I’ll listen if you want me to... But I think I should tell you now that nothing you can say will make any difference. If you don’t mind that, I don’t mind listening.

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.

May knowledge come to us! What is this secret our heart has understood and yet will not reveal to us, although it seems to beat as if it were endeavoring to tell it?

You never wanted me to be real. You never wanted anyone to be. But you didn’t want me to show it. You wanted an act to help your act...

Charity must be voluntary.

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!

...the best is a matter of standards—and I set my own standards.

It’s a law of survival, isn’t it?—to seek the best. I didn’t come for your sake. I came for mine.

Nothing can justify injustice.

Don’t tell me your evaluation. Give me the facts.

We knew not where we were going. We only knew that we must run, run to the end of the world, run to the end of our days.

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.

We fell, but we never let the box fall from our hands. Then we ran. We ran blindly, and men and houses streaked past us in a torrent without shape.

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.

...Opinion without a rational process.

If you write a line of zeroes, it´s still nothing.

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.

Upper classes are a nation's past the middle-class is its future.

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.

Never place your punch at the beginning of a column nor at the end. Sneak it in where it's least expected. Fill a whole column with drivel, just to get in that one important line.

I don't build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.

Upper classes are a nation's past the middle class is its future.