Ayn Rand

“It was a day in March, and the sky was a faint green with the first hint of spring. In Central Park, five hundred feet below, the earth caught the tone of the sky in a shade of brown that promised to become green, and the lakes lay like splinters of glass under the cobwebs of bare branches.”

“Be ugly, be God”

“You have no choice about your capacity to feel that something is good for you or evil, but what you will consider good or evil, what will give you joy or pain, what you will love or hate, desire or fear, depends on your standard of value.”

“courage and confidence are practical necessities, that courage is the practical form of being true to existence, of being true to truth, and confidence is the practical form of being true to one's own consciousness.”

“You have been called selfish for the courage of acting on your own judgement and bearing sole responsibility for your own life. You have been called arrogant for your independent mind. You have been called cruel for your unyielding integrity. You have been calle anti social for the vision that made you venture upon undiscovered roads.”

“Kira, the highest thing in man is not his god. It's that in him which knows the reverence due a god. And you, Kira, are my highest reverence...”

“As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation - or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt,Like a ball and chain in the place where your mind's wings should have grown.”

“Potentially, a government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.”

“They move past you and they wear hats and they carry bundles. But that's not the substance of them. The substance of them is hatred for any man who loves his work. That's the only kind they fear. I don't know why. You're opening yourself up, Roark, for each and every one of them.""But I never notice the people in the streets.”

“Because the beauty of the human body is that it hasn't a single muscle which doesn't serve its purpose; that there's not a line wasted; that every detail of it fits one idea, the idea of a man and the life of a man.”

“He looked at the granite. To be cut, he thought, and made into walls. He looked at a tree. To be split and made into rafters. He looked at a streak of rust on the stone and thought of iron ore under the ground. To be melted and to emerge as girders against the sky.These rocks, he thought, are waiting for me; waiting for the drill, the dynamite and my voice; waiting to be split, ripped, pounded, reborn; waiting for the shape my hands will give them.”

“The virtue involved in helping those one loves is not 'selflessness' or 'sacrifice,' but integrity.”

“We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.”

“It was beautiful and rare, and you have every right to despise me."She stood pressed to the wall, not moving."When you came in, I thought 'Send her away.' But I knew that if you went away, I'd run after you. I thought 'I won't say a word.' But I knew that you'd know it before you left. I love you. I know you'd think kindlier of me if I said that I hate you.”

“The world is ours, whenever we choose to claim it, by virtue and grace of the fact that ours is the Morality of Life.”

“Love is reverence, worship, glory, and the upward glance. But they don’t know it. Those who speak of love most promiscuously are the ones who’ve never felt it. They make some sort of feeble stew out of sympathy, compassion, contempt and general indifference, and they call it love. Once you’ve felt what it means to love–the total passion for the total height–you’re incapable of anything less..”

“Wasn't it evil to wish without moving- or to move without aim?”

“The causes of illusions are not pretty to discover. They're either vicious or tragic.”

“You want to do it?""I might. If you offer me enough.""Howard—anything you ask. Anything. I'd sell my soul...""That's the sort of thing I want you to understand. 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?”

“Who gave you the right to say all this?""You did.""Well, go on.""Do you wish the rest?""Go on.""I think it hurts you to know that you've made me suffer. You wish you hadn't. And yet there's something that frightens you more. The knowledge that I haven't suffered at all.""Go on.""The knowledge that I'm neither kind nor generous now, but simply indifferent. It frightens you, because you know that things like the Stoddard Temple always require payment--and you see that I'm not paying for it. You were astonished that I accepted this commission. Do you think my acceptance required courage? You needed far greater courage to hire me. You see, this is what I think of the Stoddard Temple. I'm through with it. You're not.”

“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”

“The difference between animals and humans is that animals change themselves for the environment, but humans change the environment for themselves.”

“There is nothing to take a man’s freedom away from him, save other men (pg. 101).”

“The secrets of this earth are not for all men to see, but only for those who will seek them (pg. 52).”

“Man is an end in himself.”

“Я не делал никакой оценки этой собственности. Я предоставил это горному инженеру. Он не очень хороший специалист, но ему очень нужна была работа. Разве не общепринято, что когда нанимаешь человека на работу, то прежде всего нужно принимать во внимание его потребности, а не то, какой он специалист?”

“But what is freedom? Freedom from what? There is nothing to take a man's freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. That is freedom. That and nothing else.”

“We are one in all and all in one. There are no men but only the great WE, One, indivisible and forever.”

“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.”

“Rules?" said Roark. "Here are my rules: what can be done with one substance must never be done with another. No two materials are alike. No two sites on earth are alike. No two buildings have the same purpose. The purpose, the site, the material determine the shape. Nothing can be reasonable or beautiful unless it's made by one central idea, and the idea sets every detail. A building is alive, like a man. Its integrity is to follow its own truth, its one single theme, and to serve its own single purpose. A man doesn't borrow pieces of his body. A building doesn't borrow hunks of its soul. Its maker gives it the soul and every wall, window and stairway to express it.”

“We shall sleep on moss for many nights, till the beasts of the body come to tear our body. We have no bed now, save the moss,and no future, save the beasts.”

“He has once built his fortune, starting out with empty hands; now he had to rebuild his life, starting out with an empty spirit”

“We knew this well, in the years of our childhood, but our curse broke our will. We were guilty and we confess it here: we were guilty of the great Transgression of Preference. We preferred some work and some lessons to the others. We did not listen well to the history of all the Councils elected since the Great Rebirth. But we loved the Science of Things. We wished to know. We wished to know about all the things which make the earth around us. We asked so many questions that the Teachers forbade it.”

“We are born into this world unarmed - our mind is our only weapon.”

“Hence the sterile, uninspiring futility of a great many theoretical discussions of ethics, and the resentment which many people feel towards such discussions: moral principles remain in their minds as floating abstractions, offering them a goal they cannot grasp and demanding that they reshape their souls in its image, thus leaving them with a burden of undefinable moral guilt.”

“To say ‘I love you’ one must first know how to say the ‘I.’ The meaning of the ‘I’ is an independent, self-sufficient entity that does not exist for the sake of any other person. A person who exists only for the sake of his loved one is not an independent entity, but a spiritual parasite. The love of a parasite is worth nothing.”

“One puts oneself above all and crushes everything in one's way to get the best for oneself.”

“If you know that this life is all that you have, wouldn't you make the most of it?”

“Know what you want in life and go after it. I worship individuals for their highest possibilities as individuals, and I loathe humanity, for its failure to live up to these possibilities.”

“Roark smiled, "Gail, if this boat were sinking, I'd give my life to save you. Not because it's any kind of duty. Only because I like you, for reasons and standards of my own. I could die for you. But I couldn't and wouldn't live for you.”

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

“writing is serious business and not for any stray bastard that wants to try it.”

“I want to know that I've accomplished something. I want to feel that it had some meaning. At the last summing up, I want to be sure it wasn't all-for nothing.”

“I love you, Dominique. As selfishly as the fact that I exist. As selfishly as my lungs breathe air. I breathe for my own necessity, for the fuel of my body, for my survival. I've given you, not my sacrifice or my pity, but my ego and my naked need. This is the only way I can want you to love me.”

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

“Who pays for the orgy?”

“Did I feel a physical desire for him? I did. Was I moved by a passion of my body? I was. Have I experienced the most violent form of sensual pleasure? I have.”

“I love you so much that nothing can matter to me - not even you...Only my love- not your answer. Not even your indifference”

“She was seeing the brand of pain and fear on the faces of people, and the look of evasion that refuses to know it–they seemed to be going through the motions of some enormous pretense, acting out a ritual to ward off reality, letting the earth remain unseen and their lives unlived, in dread of something namelessly forbidden–yet the forbidden was the simple act of looking at the nature of their pain and questioning their duty to bear it.”

“Now observe that in all the propaganda of the ecologists—amidst all their appeals to nature and pleas for “harmony with nature”—there is no discussion of man’s needs and the requirements of his survival. Man is treated as if he were an unnatural phenomenon. Man cannot survive in the kind of state of nature that the ecologists envision—i.e., on the level of sea urchins or polar bears....In order to survive, man has to discover and produce everything he needs, which means that he has to alter his background and adapt it to his needs. Nature has not equipped him for adapting himself to his background in the manner of animals. From the most primitive cultures to the most advanced civilizations, man has had to manufacture things; his well-being depends on his success at production. The lowest human tribe cannot survive without that alleged source of pollution: fire. It is not merely symbolic that fire was the property of the gods which Prometheus brought to man. The ecologists are the new vultures swarming to extinguish that fire.”