Ayn Rand quotes - page 16

If that's the price of getting together, then I'll be damned if I want to live on the same earth with any human beings If the rest of them can survive only by destroying us, then why should we wish them to survive Nothing can make self-immolation proper. Nothing can give them the right to turn men into sacrificial animals. Nothing can make it moral to destroy the best. One can't be punished for being good. One can't be penalized for ability. If that is right, then we'd better start slaughtering one another, because there isn't any right at all in the world. (Ayn Rand)
I think it's a sin to sit down and let your life go without making a try for it. View quote
Ayn Rand
Allies never trust each other, but that doesn't spoil their effectiveness. View quote
Ayn Rand
The men of the press, who despised their own profession, did not know why they were enjoying it today. One of them, a young man with years of notorious success behind him and a cynical look of twice his age, said suddenly, 'I know what I'd like to be I wish I could be a man who covers news' View quote
Ayn Rand
A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality. View quote
Ayn Rand
Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever. View quote
Ayn Rand
You'd let the whole world perish rather than soil that immaculate self of yours with a single spot of which you'd have to be ashamed. View quote
Ayn Rand
So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate the use of physical force against others.... When a man attempts to deal with me by force, I answer him by force. It is only as retaliation that force may be used and only against the man who starts its use. No, I do not share his evil or sink to his concept of morality I merely grant him his choice, destruction, the only destruction he had the right to choose his own. View quote
Ayn Rand
I sat there beside him till morning and as I watched his face in the starlight, then the first ray of the sun on his untroubled forehead and closed eyelids, what I experienced was not a prayer, I do not pray, but that state of spirit at which a prayer is a misguided attempt a full, confident, affirming self-dedication to my love of the right, to the certainty that the right would win and that this boy would have the kind of future he deserved.... I did not expect it to be as great as this or as hard. View quote
Ayn Rand
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. View quote
Ayn Rand
That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call 'free will' is your mind's freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character. (Ayn Rand)
I am neither foe nor friend to my brothers, but such as each of them shall deserve of me. And to earn my love, my brothers must do more than to have been born. I do not grant my love without reason, nor to any chance passer-by who may wish to claim it. I honor men with my love. But honor is a thing to be earned. View quote
Ayn Rand
She fell asleep, lying there, her hand clasping his. Her last awareness, before she surrendered the responsibility of consciousness, was the sense of an enormous void, the void of a city and of a continent, where she would never be able to find the man whom she had no right to seek. View quote
Ayn Rand
It is not as late as you think. It is merely early in the age of the rebirth of individualism. View quote
Ayn Rand
That love is reverence, and worship, and glory, and the upward glance. Not a bandage for dirty sores. 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, comtempt, and general indiference, and they call it love. Once you've felt what it means to love as you and I know it - the total passion for the total height - you are unable of anything else. View quote
Ayn Rand
Your eyes are as a flame, but our brothers have neither hope nor fire. Your mouth is cut of granite, but our brothers are soft and humble. Your head is high, but our brothers cringe. You walk, but our brothers crawl. We wish to be damned with you, rather than blessed with all our brothers. Do as you please with us, but do not send us away from you. View quote
Ayn Rand
You will follow me, if we are what we are, you and I, if we live, if the world exists, if you know the meaning of this moment and can't let it slip by, as others let it slip, into the senselessness of the unwilled and unreached. View quote
Ayn Rand
Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind, and a step that travels unlimited roads. View quote
Ayn Rand
Married people dont look like they have bedrooms on their minds when they look at each other. In this world, either you're virtuous or you enjoy yourself. Not both...Not both. View quote
Ayn Rand
You'll come back, because yours is an error of knowledge, not a moral failure, not an act of surrender to evil, but only the last act of being victim to your own virtue. We'll wait for you and when you come back, you will have discovered that there need never be any conflict among your desires, nor so tragic a clash of values as the one you've borne so well. View quote
Ayn Rand
The nation which once held the creed that greatness is achieved by production, is now told that it is achieved by squalor. (Ayn Rand)
But a few understand that building is a great symbol we live in our minds, and existence is the attempt to bring that life into physical reality, to state it in gesture and form. For the man who understands this, a house he owns is a statement of his life. View quote
Ayn Rand
Why is it immoral for you to desire, but moral for others to do so Why is it immoral to produce a value and keep it, but moral to give it away And if it is not moral for you to keep a value, why is it moral for others to accept it If you are selfless and virtuous when you give it, are they not selfish and vicious when they take it. View quote
Ayn Rand
If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose ... the fact that they were the people who created the phrase 'to make money.' No other language or nation had ever used these words before.... Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. View quote
Ayn Rand
Or did you say it's the love of money that's the root of all evil To love a thing is to know its nature. To love money is to known and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it. View quote
Ayn Rand