Quotes from Ayn Rand

What kind of 'changing world', Alvah? Changing to what? From what? Who's doing the changing?

The integrated sum of a man's basic values is his sense of life.

Litigants obey the verdict of a tribunal solely on the premise that there is an objective rule of conduct, which they both accept.

One doesn't get to be first in anything without the strength to make some sacrifices.

Don't despise the middleman. He's necessary. Someone had to tell them. It takes two to make a very good career: the man who is great, and the man-almost rarer-who is great enough to see greatness and say so.

What I was referring to was not religion as such, but a special category of abstractions, the most exalted one, which, for centuries, had been the near-monopoly of religion: ethics--not the particular content of religious ethics, but the abstraction ethics, the realm of values, man's code of good and evil, with the emotional connotations of height, uplift, nobility, reverence, grandeur, which pertain to the realm of man's values, but which religion has arrogated to itself.

Almost unanimously, man is regarded as an unnatural phenomenon: either as a supernatural entity, whose mystic (divine) endowment, the mind ("soul"), is above nature—or as a subnatural entity, whose mystic (demoniacal) endowment, the mind, is an enemy of nature ("ecology"). The purpose of all such theories is to exempt man from the Law of Identity.

Its the critic's job to interpret the artist, even to the artist himself.

Shall I tell you the difference between you and your statue? No. But I want to. It's startling to see the same elements used in two compositions with opposite themes. Everything about you in that statue is the theme of exaltation. But your own theme is suffering. Suffering? I'm not conscious of having shown that. You haven't. That's what I meant. No happy person can be quite so impervious to pain.

Nothing can make it moral to destroy the best. One can't be punished for beeing 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.

Do you expect me to forget what you are?" he asked, knowing that this was what he had forgotten. "I do not expect you to think of me at all.

She caught herself thinking: She's functioning well in an emergency, I'll be all right with her—and realized that she was thinking of herself.