Quotes from Ayn Rand

No happy person can be quite so impervious to pain (Gail Wynand to Dominique Francon)

The crowd would have forgiven anything, except a man who could remain normal under the vibrations of its enormous collective sneer.

Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice — and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man — by choice; he has to hold his life as a value — by choice; he has to learn to sustain it — by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues — by choice. A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.

There's nothing of any importance in life—except how well you do your work.

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.

To fear to face an issue to believe that the worst is true. --Atlas Shrugged

Be ugly, be God

For they have nothing to fight me with, save the brute force of their numbers. I have my mind.

Those who grant sympathy to guilt, grant none to innocence.

He wanted nothing, for the time being, except to understand .... Without advice, assistance or plan, he began reading an incongruous assortment of books; he would find some passage which he could not understand in one book, and he would get another on that subject .... There was no order in his reading; but there was order in what remained of it in his mind.

They talked about nothing in particular, sentences that had meaning only in the sound of the voices, in warm gaiety, in the ease of complete relaxation.

I don't make comparisons. I never think of myself in relation to anyone else. I just refuse to measure myself as part of anything. I'm an utter egotist.