Quotes from Ayn Rand

We wish to be damned with you, rather than blessed with all our brothers. Do

I and they, my chosen friends, my fellow-builders, shall write the firsts chapter in the new history of man

Eddie, what do we care about people like him? We're driving an express, and they're riding on the roof, making a lot of noise about being leaders. Why should we care? We have enough power to carry them along — haven't we?

Do not expect consistency. Everything is a contradiction of everything else. Nothing exists but contradictions.

The adversary she found herself forced to fight was not worth matching or beating; it was not a superior ability which she would have found honor in challenging; it was ineptitude—a gray spread of cotton that 'seemed soft and shapeless, that could offer no resistance to anything or anybody, yet managed to be a barrier in her way.

Your house is made by its own needs. Those others are made by the need to impress. The determining motive of your house is in the house. The determining motive of the other is in the audience.

The process of observing the facts of reality and of integrating them into concepts is, in essence, a process of induction. The process of subsuming new instances under a known concept is, in essence, a process of deduction.

We lived by that which we held to be good and punished that which we held to be evil. You live by that which you denounce as evil and punish that which you know to be good.

The Romanticists did not present a hero as a statistical average, but as an abstraction of man's best and highest potentiality, applicable to and achievable by all men, in various degrees, according to their individual choices.

Most people feel that they rise in their own eyes, if others want them. I feel that others live up to me, if they want me. And that is the way you feel, too, Hank, about yourself—whether you admit it or not.

He looked at the paper before him. He wondered why ineptitude should exist and have its say.

She did not mind this new background; she was indifferent to the slums as she had been indifferent to the drawing rooms.