Quotes from Ayn Rand

He sat looking at her. She waited to see the derisive smile, but it did not come. The smile seemed implicit in the room itself, in her standing there, halfway across that room.

If a ray of light falls into a pigsty, it is the ray that shows us the muck and it is the ray that is offensive.

What would happen to the world without those who do, think, work, produce? Those are the egotists. You don't think through another's brain and you don't work through another's hands. When you suspend your faculty of independent judgment, you suspend consciousness. To stop consciousness is to stop life.

You can't be hard on a man who needs you, it will prey on your conscience for the rest of your life." "It won't." "You've got to be kind, Henry." "I'm not." "You've got to have some pity." "I haven't." "A good man knows how to forgive." "I don't." "You wouldn't want me to think that you're selfish." "I am.

Reason functions by integrating perceptual data into concepts.

It is not advisable, James, to venture unsolicited opinions. You should spare yourself the embarrassing discovery of their exact value to your listener.

socialism is the doctrine that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that his life and his work do not belong to him, but belong to society, that the only justification of his existence is his service to society, and that society may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good.

I want you to observe...that those who cry the loudest about their disillusionment, about the failure of virtue, the futility of reason, the impotence of logic—are those who have achieved the full, exact, logical result of the ideas they preached, so mercilessly logical that they dare not identify it.

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.

He defeated her by admitting her power; she could not have the gratification of enforcing it.

I want to see, real, living, and in the hours of my own days, that glory I create as an illusion! I want it real! I want to know that there is someone, somewhere, who wants it, too! Or else what is the use of seeing it, and working, and burning oneself for an impossible vision? A spirit, too, needs fuel. It can run dry.

It's so much easier to pass judgment on a man than on an idea.