Quotes from Ayn Rand

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!

A thinking child cannot conform. Thought does not bow to authority.

Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future.

The world is ours, whenever we choose to claim it, by virtue and grace of the fact that ours is the Morality of Life.

The position of an art in the scale of human knowledge is, perhaps, the most eloquent symptom of the gulf between man's progress in the physical sciences and his stagnation (or, today, his retrogression) in the humanities.

All I know is, unselfishness is the only moral principle, said Jessica Pratt, the noblest principle and a sacred duty and much more important than freedom. Unselfishness is the only way to happiness. I would have everybody who refused to be unselfish shot. To put them out of their misery. They can't be happy anyway.

HOWARD ROARK LAUGHED. He stood naked at the edge of a cliff. The lake lay far below him. A frozen explosion of granite burst in flight to the sky over motionless water. The water seemed immovable, the stone flowing. The stone had the stillness of one brief moment in battle when thrust meets thrust and the currents are held in a pause more dynamic than motion. The stone glowed, wet with sunrays.

If ever the pleasure of one has to be bought by the pain of the other, there better be no trade at all. A trade by which one gains and the other loses is a fraud.

she had always looked for sparks of competence, like a diamond prospector in an unpromising wasteland.

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.

But don't I have any freedom of speech?" "In your own house. Not in mine." "Don't I have a right to my own ideas?" "At your own expense. Not at mine." "Don't you tolerate any differences of opinion?" "Not when I'm paying the bills.

it was not a silence of resentment; it was the silence of an understanding too delicate to limit by words.