Quotes about Achievement

All the giants of the spirit whom I've broken. I don't think anybody ever realized how much I enjoyed doing it. It's a kind of lust. I'm perfectly indifferent to slugs like Ellsworth Toohey or my friend Alvah, and quite willing to leave them in peace. But just let me see a man of a slightly higher dimension—and I've got to make a sort of Toohey out of him. I've got to. It's like a sex urge.

It does not matter that only a few in each generation will grasp and achieve the full reality of man's proper stature—and that the rest will betray it. It is those few that move the world and give life its meaning—and it is those few that I have always sought to address.

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

to settle down into a job that requires less than your mind's full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay—that

There are only individual minds and individual achievements—and a culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiated masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.

You know, I'm not any kind of a great man. I couldn't have built that railroad. If it goes, I won't be able to bring it back. I'll have to go with it. . . .

You know, I'm not any kind of a great man. I couldn't have built that railroad. If it goes, I won't be able to bring it back. I'll have to go with it. . . .

You know, sometimes I'll go to an 8th-grade graduation and there's all that pomp and circumstance and gowns and flowers. And I think to myself, it's just 8th grade ... An 8th-grade education doesn't cut it today. Let's give them a handshake and tell them to get their butts back in the library!

Confidence. The secret to a man's success.

I did it to win love, and to prove myself capable. Not to move mountains. In my opinions, mountains don't move. They only look changed when you look down on them from great height.

First, I got myself born. The worst of the job was up to me.

At sunrise it always seems like you've got a good crack at getting everything done, but at sunset you know that you didn't.