I love you so much that nothing can matter to me – not even you…Only my love- not your answer. Not even your indifference
Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?
I could die for you. But I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, live for you.
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?
Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life.
He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see.
My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose.
The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
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.
Devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality; there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.
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.
I take no pride in hopeless longing; I wouldn’t hold a stillborn aspiration. I’d want to have it, to make it, to live it.
I can accept anything, except what seems to be the easiest for most people: the half-way, the almost, the just-about, the in-between.
My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.
Every form of happiness if one, every desire is driven by the same motor–by our love for a single value, for the highest potentiality of our own existence–and every achievement is an expression of it.
Anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today.
We are born into this world unarmed – our mind is our only weapon.
A moment or an eternity—did it matter? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist.
You know, I think that only if one feels immensely important can one feel truly light.
An inventor is a man who asks ‘Why?’ of the universe and lets nothing stand between the answer and his mind.
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.
In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.
A culture is made — or destroyed — by its articulate voices.
Contrary to the ecologists, nature does not stand still and does not maintain the kind of equilibrium that guarantees the survival of any particular species – least of all the survival of her greatest and most fragile product: man.
Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade…
And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride. This god, this one word: ‘I.
Aristotle may be regarded as the cultural barometer of Western history. Whenever his influence dominated the scene, it paved the way for one of history’s brilliant eras; whenever it fell, so did mankind.
An attempt to achieve the good by force is like an attempt to provide a man with a picture gallery at the price of cutting out his eyes.
The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.
Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration.
Whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man’s nature and of life’s potential.
If that which we have found is the corruption of solitude, then what can men wish for save corruption? If this is the great evil of being alone, than what is good and what is evil?
The truth is not for all men but only for those who seek it.
I think that when in doubt about the truth of an issue, it’s safer and in better taste to select the least numerous of the adversaries.
Learn to value yourself, which means: fight for your happiness.
What in hell are you really made of, Howard? After all, it’s only a building. It’s not the combination of holy sacrament, Indian torture, and sexual ecstasy that you seem to make of it.””Isn’t it?
The man who discovers new knowledge is the permanent benefactor of humanity.
Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.
Do it first and feel about it afterwards.’ – Dagny Taggart
We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.
There is fear hanging in the air of the sleeping halls, and the air of the streets. Fear walks through the city, fear without name, without shape. All men feel it and none dare speak.
Fear walks through the City, fear without name, without shape. All men feel it and none dare to speak.
…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…
When you are asked to love everybody indiscriminately, that is to love people without any standard, to love them regardless of whether they have any value or virtue, you are asked to love nobody.
A house can have integrity, just like a person,’ said Roark, ‘and just as seldom.
For the coming of that day shall I fight, I and my sons and my chosen friends. For the freedom of Man. For his rights. For his life. For his honor.
I understood that centuries of chains and lashes will not kill the spirit of man nor the sense of truth within him.
When the law no longer protects you from the corrupt, but protects the corrupt from you – you know your nation is doomed.
And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride. This god, this one word: “I.
Keating stood still, because he understood for the first time what it was that artists spoke about when they spoke of beauty.
My real soul…? It’s real only when it’s independent…
Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artists metaphysical value judgments.
An artist reveals his naked soul in his work – and so, gentle reader, do you when you respond to it.
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.
We are all brothers under the skin – and I, for one, would be willing to skin humanity to prove it.
It’s not that I don’t suffer, it’s that I know the unimportance of suffering, I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one’s soul and as a permanent scar across one’s view of existence.
I’m not capable of suffering completely. I never have. It goes only down to a certain point and then it stops. As long as there is that untouched point, it’s not really pain.
She found a dark satisfaction in pain—because that pain came from him.
The dance is the silent partner of music and participates in a division of labor: music presents a stylized version of man’s consciousness in action—the dance presents a stylized version of man’s body in action.
They scattered with no melody, no harmony, no rhythm to hold them. If music was emotion and emotion came from thought, then this was the scream of chaos, of the irrational, of the helpless, of man’s self-abdication.
The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.
A process of reason is a process of constant choice in answer to the question: True or False? – Right or Wrong?
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.
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.
Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.
Since life requires a specific course of action, any other course will destroy it. A being who does not hold his own life as the motive and goal of his actions, is acting on the motive and standard of death.
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.
There is a morality of reason, a morality proper to man, and Man’s Life is its standard of value.All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys it is the evil.
Man has the power to act as his own destroyer—and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.
Reason is your means of survival — so that for you, who are a human being, the question ‘to be or not to be’ is the question ‘to think or not to think..’.
It does take an exceptional mind and a still more exceptional integrity to remain untouched by the brain-destroying influences of the world’s doctrines, the accumulated evil of centuries—to remain human, since the human is the rational.
Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?
The source of work? Man’s mind…man’s reasoning mind.
Whenever a man denounces the mind, it is because his goal is of a nature the mind would not permit him to confess.
…they want us to pretend that we see the world as they pretend they see it. They need some sort of sanction from us.
Señor d.‘Anconia, what do you think is going to happen to the world?”“Just exactly what it deserves.”“Oh, how cruel!”“Don’t you believe in the operation of the moral law, madame?” Francisco asked gravely. “I do.
Men hate passion, any great passion. Henry Cameron made a mistake : he loved his work. That was why he fought. That was why he lost.
I love doing it. Every building is like a person. Single and unrepeatable.
There are two things we must get rid of early in life: a feeling of personal superiority and an exaggerated reverence for the sexual act.
Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life. Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself.
Observe the ugly mess which most men make of their sex lives—and observe the mess of contradictions which they hold as their moral philosophy.
The man who despises himself tries to gain self-esteem from sexual adventures —which can’t be done, because sex is not the cause, but an effect and an expression of a man’s sense of his own value.
What glory can there be in the conquest of a mindless body?
Sex is the physical expression of a tribute to personal values.
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.
He’s not really struggling even for material wealth, but for the second-hander’s delusion—prestige. A stamp of approval, not his own. He can find no joy in the struggle and no joy when he has succeeded.
Isn’t it wonderful that our bodies can give us so much pleasure?” he said to her once, quite simply. They were happy and radiantly innocent. They were both incapable of the conception that joy is sin.
The statue was of a young man with a tall, gaunt body and an angular face. He held his head as if he faced a challenge and found joy in his capacity to meet it.
One gains a profoundly personal, selfish joy from the mere existence of the person one loves. It is one’s own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns and derives from love.
She had never done these things before; she did them expertly. She had a capacity for action, a competence that clashed incongruously with her appearance.
The age of the skyscraper is gone. This is the age of the housing project. Which is always a prelude to the age of the cave.
He did not know that he was expected to attempt to buy his way into society and that they anticipated the pleasure of rejecting him. He had no time to notice their disappointment.
…there can be no justification for a society in which a man is expected to manufacture the weapons for his own murderers.
Politically, the goal of today’s dominant trendis statism. Philosophically, the goal is theobliteration of reason;psychologically, it is theerosion of ambition.
The writer who develops a beautiful style, but has nothing to say, represents a kind of arrested esthetic development; he is like a pianist who acquires a brilliant technique by playing finger-exercises, but never gives a concert.
A cardinal principle of good fiction [is]: the theme and the plot of a novel must be integrated—as thoroughly integrated as mind and body or thought and action in a rational view of man.
In art, and in literature, the end and the means, or the subject and the style, must be worthy of each other.That which is not worth contemplating in life, is not worth re-creating in art.
A good novel is an indivisible sum: every scene, sequence and passage of a good novel has to involve, contribute to and advance all three of its major attributes: theme, plot, characterization.
He walked, groping for a sentence that hung in his mind as an empty shape. He could neither fill it or dismiss it.
Roark spoke quietly. He was the only man in the room who felt certain of his own words.
The only pride of her workday was not that it had been lived, but that it had been survived. It was wrong, she thought, it was viciously wrong that one should ever be forced to say that about any hour of one’s life.
Honest people are never touchy about the matter of being trusted.
But, you see, it’s not what you do that matters really. It’s only you.””Me what?””Just you here. Or you in the city. Or you somewhere in the world. I don’t know. Just that.
The exquisite kindliness of her manner suggested that their relationship was of no possible consequence, that she could not pay him the tribute of hostility.
Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.
You, whom I have always loved and never found, you whom I expected to see at the end of the rails beyond the horizon—
What is kinder–to believe the best of people and burden them with a nobility beyond their endurance–or to see them as they are, and accept it because it makes them comfortable?
Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.
What’s wealth but the means of expanding one’s life? There’s two ways one can do it: either by producing more or by producing it faster.
Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed.
A man’s spirit is his self. That entity which is his consciousness. To think, to feel, to judge, to act are functions of the ego.
If, to him, love was a celebration of one’s self and of existence—then, to the self-haters and life-haters, the pursuit of destruction was the only form and equivalent of love.
..it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed. It is the unsacrificed self that we must respect in man above all.
The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone.
When men reject reason, they have no means left for dealing with one another — except brute, physical force.
I want to sleep with you. Now, tonight, and at any time you may care to call me. I want your naked body, your skin. your mouth, your hands…—I want you like an animal…or a whore.
I want to sleep with you. Now, tonight, and at any time you may care to call me. I want your naked body, your skin. your mouth, your hands…I want you like an animal…or a whore.
The desire not to be anything is the desire not to be.
If you want my advice, Peter,” he said at last, “you’ve made a mistake already. By asking me. By asking anyone. Never ask people. Not about your work. Don’t you know what you want? How can you stand it, not to know?
There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.
When you consider socialism, do not fool yourself about its nature. Remember that there is no such dichotomy as “human rights” versus “property rights.” No human rights can exist without property rights.
The justice which would forgive miles of innocent errors of knowledge, would not forgive a single step taken in conscious evil.
People are not embracing collectivism because they have accepted bad economics. They are accepting bad economics because they have embraced collectivism.
…one cannot deal with pure evil, with the naked, full-conscious evil that neither has nor seeks justification.
Those who grant sympathy to guilt, grant none to innocence.
Art is inextricably tied to man’s survival – not to his physical survival, but to that on which his physical survival depends: to the preservation and survival of his consciousness.
Integrity is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your consciousness, just as honesty is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake existence.
When the train stopped, when she got off and heard the concrete of the platform under her heels, she felt light, lifted, impelled to action. She started off, walking fast, as if the speed of her steps could give form to the things she felt.
…were she lying crushed under the ruins of a building, were she torn by the bomb of an air raid, so long as she was still in existence she would know that action is man’s foremost obligation, regardless of anything he feels…
To say “I love you” one must know first how to say the “I”.
Do not cry that it is our duty to serve you. We do not recognize such duty. Do not cry that you need us. We do not consider need a claim. Do not cry that you own us. You don’t.
To be free, a man must be free from his brothers. That is freedom. That and nothing else.
At a time like this, we can’t afford the luxury of thinking!
Don’t you know that most people take most things because that’s what’s given them, and they have no opinion whatever? Do you wish to be guided by what they expect you to think they think or by your own judgment?
There is noroom for the love of others within the tight, crowded miser’s hole of a privateego. Be empty in order to be filled. ’He that loveth his life shall lose it; andhe that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.
What is morality, she asked.Judgement to distinguish right and wrong, vision to see the truth, and courage to act upon it, dedication to that which is good, integrity to stand by the good at any price.
Racism negates two aspects of man’s life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination.
Incredulity and indifference were her only reaction: incredulity, because she could not conceive of what would bring human beings to such a state —indifference, because she could not regard those who reached it, as human any longer.
You are an unusual, brilliant child who has not seen enough of life to grasp the full measure of human stupidity.
You’re so beautiful, Dominique. Its such a lovely accident on God’s part that there’s one person who matches inside and out.
It takes two to make a very great career: the man who is great, and the man–almost rarer–who is great enough to see greatness and say so.
A rational man never distorts or corrupts his own standards…in order to appeal to the irrationality, dishonesty or stupidity of others.
A desire to choose the hardest might be a confession of weakness in itself.
From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man—the function of his reasoning mind.
…there’s nothing of any importance in life—except how well you do your work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are, will come from that. It’s the only measure of human value.
Keating felt naked…People were his protection against people. Roark had no sense of people. Others gave Keating a feeling of his own value. Roark gave him nothing.
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.
When one acts on pity against justice, it is the good whom one punishes for the sake of the evil; when one saves the guilty from suffering, it is the innocent whom one forces to suffer.
Dont switch the blame to her, that’s the oldest trick of all cowards
And no one rose to ask the question: Good?-by what standard?John Galt
Happiness is self-contained and self-sufficient. Happy men have no time and no use for you. Happy men are free men.
…if ever you hear a man telling you that you must be happy, that it’s your natural right, that your first duty is to yourself—that will be the man who’s not after your soul.
There is only one path to heaven. On Earth we call it Love.
No action could be lower or more futile than for one person to throw upon another the burden of his abdication of choice.
Their eyes were dark and hard and glowing, with no fear in them, no kindness and no guilt.
We alone, of the thousands who walk this earth, we alone in this hour are doing a work which has no purpose save that we wish to do it.
The power of the sky can be made to do men’s bidding. There are no limits to its secrets and its might, and it can be made to grant us anything if we but choose to ask.
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.
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.
But why should you care what people will say? All you have to do is please yourself.
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.
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 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.
All that which proceeds from man’s independent ego is good. All that which proceeds from man’s dependence upon men is evil.
Great men can’t be ruled… The great is the rare, the difficult, the exceptional.
Let’s stop and think for a moment. Is sacrifice a virtue? Can a man sacrifice his integrity? His honor? His freedom? His ideal? His convictions? The honesty of his feeling? The independence of his thought?
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
…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.
For this wire is as a part of our body, as a vein torn from us, glowing with our blood. Are we proud of this thread of metal, or of our hands which made it, or is there a line to divide these two?
We have lied to ourselves. We have not built this box for the good of our brothers. We built it for its own sake. It is above all our brothers to us, and its truth above their truth.
The ‘ pleasure’ of being drunk is obviously the pleasure of escaping from the responsibility of Consciousness.
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.
This box is useless,” said Alliance 6-7349.Should it be what they claim of it,” said Harmony 9-2642, “then it would bring ruin to the Department of Candles.
I’m not asking you to do your best. I’m asking you to do your job.” -Dagny Taggart
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.
You are so lost to your higher self that you would resent me for my achievements, rather than celebrate them with me, sexually?
Tell me what a person finds sexually attractive and I will tell you their entire philosophy of life. Show me the person they sleep with and I will tell you their valuation of themselves.
His face was like a law of nature—a thing one could not question, alter or implore. It had high cheekbones over gaunt, hollow cheeks; gray eyes, cold and steady; a contemptuous mouth, shut tight, the mouth of an executioner or a saint.
As she looked at him, her dark gray eyes went slowly from astonishment to stillness, then to a strange expression that resembled a look of weariness, except that it seemed to reflect much more than the endurance of this one moment.
I worship individuals for their highest possibilities as individuals and I loathe humanity for its failure to live up to these possibilities.
Let us throw away our candles and our torches. Let us flood the cities with light. Let us bring a new light to men! -Equality 7-2521
The pursuit of truth is not important. The pursuit of that truth is important which helps you in reaching your goal that is provided you have one.
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.
Only a man of integrity can possess the virtue of honesty, since only the faking of one’s consciousness can permit the faking of existence.
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.
If the rest of them can survive only by destroying us, then why should we wish them to survive? . . . Nothing can make it moral to destroy the best. One can’t be punished for being good. One can’t be penalized for ability.
…What kind of a tragedy did you have in your childhood?””Why, none at all. I had a wonderful childhood. Free and peaceful and not bothered too much by anybody. Well, yes, I did feel bored very often. But I’m used to that.
…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 .
Freedom (n.): To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.
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.
No speech is ever considered, but only the speaker. It’s so much easier to pass judgement on a man than on an idea.
Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
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…
Everyone has the right to make his own decisions, but none has the right to force his decision on others.
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.
It was the only lie she ever told. She did not do it to protect Francisco; she did it because she felt, for some reason which she could not define, that the incident was a secret too precious to share.
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?
She wanted to tell him of the years she had spent looking for men such as he to work with; she wanted to tell him that his enemies were hers, that she was fighting the same battle…
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…
He stepped to the window and pointed to the skyscrapers of the city. He said that we had to extinguish the lights of the world, and when we would see the lights of New York go out, we would know that our job was done.
…dangers, to Francisco, were merely opportunities for another brilliant performance; there were no battles he could lose, no enemies to beat him.
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.
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.
If you write a line of zeroes, it´s still nothing.
The skyline of New York is a monument of a splendour that no pyramids or palaces will ever equal or approach.
The entire history of science is a progression of exploded fallacies.
Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values.
My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose.
To demand ‘sense’ is the hallmark of nonsense. Nature does not make sense. Nothing makes sense.
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.
The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it.
Upper classes are a nation’s past the middle-class is its future.
Productive work is the central purpose of a rational man’s life the central value that integrates and determines the hierarchy of all his other values. Reason is the source the precondition of his productive work – pride is the result.
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.
Serenity comes from the ability to say “Yes” to existence. Courage comes from the ability to say “No” to the wrong choices made by others.
Government ‘help’ to business is just as disastrous as government persecution… the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off.
When I die, I hope to go to Heaven, whatever the Hell that is.
To say ‘I love you’ one must first be able to say the ‘I.’
Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values.
I don’t build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.
A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.
When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is learning to understand and control the behavior of crop plants and domestic animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized.
The ladder of success is best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity.
The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.
To achieve, you need thought. You have to know what you are doing and that’s real power.
Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice.
God… a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man’s power to conceive.
The truth is not for all men, but only for those who seek it.
A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.
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.
Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men’s stupidity, but your talent to their reason.
So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of all money?
Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter.
If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.
Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision.
Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone.
Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.
Upper classes are a nation’s past the middle class is its future.