Quotes from Ayn Rand

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?

He never felt lonliness except when he was happy.

I shall choose friends among men, but neither slaves nor masters. And I shall choose only such as please me, and them I shall love and respect, but neither command nor obey. And we shall join our hands when we wish, or walk alone when we so desire.

It's good to suffer. Dont complain. Bear, bow, accept - and be grateful that God has made you suffer. For this makes you better than the people who are laughing and happy.

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.

Let us destroy, but don't let us pretend that we are commiting an act of virtue.

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. 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.

I like cigarettes, Miss Taggart. I like to think of fire held in a man's hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke a cigarette thinking. I wonder what great things have come from those hours. When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind - and it is only proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression.

She's a writer. The kind of writer who wouldn't be published outside. She believes that when one deals with words, one deals with the mind.

Today we have discovered the word that could not be said. I

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 guard my treasures: my thought, my will, my freedom. And the greatest of these is freedom.