Quotes from Ayn Rand

I want to be prepared to claim the greatest virtue of all - that I was a man who made money

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.

We are nothing mankind is all

You don't care what others think - which might be understandable. But you don't care even to make them think as you do? No. But that's...that's monstrous. Is it? Probably. I couldn't say.

He demanded of all people the one thing he had never granted anybody: obedience.

Money is the barometer of society's virtue.

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

and the desire would never be satisfied, except by a being of equal greatness.

If lightning strikes a rotten tree and it collapses, it's not the fault of the lightning.

For our face and body were beautiful. Our face was not like the faces of our brothers, for we felt not pity when looking upon it. Our body was not like the bodies of our brothers, for our limbs were straigth and thin and hard and strong. And we thought that we could trust this being who looked upon us from the stream, and that we had nothing to fear with this being.

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.

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.