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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 3bfb3c9 | People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I've learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one's reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one's master, comdemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person's view requires to be faked. | Ayn Rand | ||
| ca6ad94 | There's no such thing as a lousy job-only lousy men who don't care to do it. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 0b3ea8a | She stood, in a room of crumbling plaster, pressed to the window-pane, looking up at the unattainable form of everything she loved. She did not know the nature of her loneliness. The only words that named it were: This is not the world I expected. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 4dc222e | People said it because other people said it. They did not know why it was being said and heard everywhere. they did not give or ask for reasons. | Ayn Rand | ||
| ebe0267 | You'd let the whole world perish rather than soil that immaculate self of yours with a single spot of which you'd have to be ashamed. | Ayn Rand | ||
| fdd9396 | We cannot say what they meant, for there are no words for their meaning, but we know it without words and we knew it then. | Ayn Rand | ||
| d8fca13 | Things stood still, not a leaf trembled on the branches, while the sky slowly lost its color and became an expanse that looked like the spread of glowing water. | Ayn Rand | ||
| aefca26 | The nation which once held the creed that greatness is achieved by production, is now told that it is achieved by squalor. | Ayn Rand | ||
| cac242a | sometimes, she felt pity for those countless nameless ones somewhere around them who, in a feverish quest, were searching for some answer, and in their search crushed others, perhaps even her; but she could not be crushed, for she had the answer. | Ayn Rand | ||
| e67b8f1 | It is a sin to write this. It is a sin to think words no others think and to put them down upon a paper no others are to see. It is base and evil. It is as if we were speaking alone to no ears but our own. And we know well that there is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone. We have broken the laws. The laws say that men may not write unless the Council of Vocations bid them so. May we be forgiven! | Ayn Rand | ||
| 905dbb4 | You want to know what's wrong with the world?" Dad paused. "It's this alienation that permeates every aspect of humanity." | ayn-rand christianity humanity objectivism philosophy world-views | Mark David Henderson | |
| a5d75c7 | Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, doubtless two of the most exquisitely adolescent of fictions. | Nancy Mairs | ||
| d3da61a | It was a long story and the spirt which moved it was the spirit of man's freedom. But what is freedom? Freedom from what? There is nothing to take a man's freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. that is freedom. This and nothing else. ~Equality 7-2521 (as Prometheus), pg 101 | Ayn Rand | ||
| 05c7b02 | I stand here on the summit of the mountain. I lift my head and I spread my arms. This, my body and spirit, this is the end of the quest. I wished to know the meaning of things. I am the meaning. I wished to find a warrant for being. I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction. It is my eyes which see, and the sight of my eyes grants beauty to the earth. It is my ears which hear, and .. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 9209d4d | It's only a matter of getting through the next few moments, she thought: take care of the next few moments, and then the next, a few at a time, and after a while it will be easier; you'll get over it, after a while. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 7d4e7d9 | Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade--with reason, not force, as their final arbiter--it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability--and the degree of a man's productiveness is the degree of his reward. Th.. | francisco-d-anconia money | Ayn Rand | |
| d18533e | There were sharp little blows in the music, and waves of quick, fine notes that burst and rolled like the thin, clear ringing of broken glass. There were slow notes, as if the cords of the violins trembled in hesitation, tense with the fullness of sound, taking a few measured steps before the leap into the explosion of laughter. | Ayn Rand | ||
| c7d6e84 | Why yes, I can,' said Midas Mulligan, when he was asked whether he could name a person more evil than the man with a heart closed to pity. 'The man who uses another's pity for him as a weapon. | positive-self-image self-assurance self-confidence | Ayn Rand | |
| 721a4d3 | Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by fraud--that an attempt to gain a value by deceiving the mind of others is an act of raising your victims to a position higher than reality, where you become a pawn of their blindness, a slave of their non-thinking and their evasions, while their intelligence, their rationality, their perceptiv.. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 056b670 | Capitalism was the only system in history where wealth was not acquired by looting, but by production, not by force, but by trade, the only system that stood for man's right to his own mind, to his work, to his life, to his happiness, to himself. | Ayn Rand | ||
| b149608 | He's paying the price and wondering for what sin and telling himself that he's been too selfish. In what act or thought of his has there ever been a self? What was his aim in life? Greatness--in other people's eyes. Fame, admiration, envy--all that which comes from others. Others dictated his convictions, which he did not hold, but he was satisfied that others believed he held them. Others were his motive power and his prime concern. He did.. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 1f1cfaa | A right doesn't include the material implementation of that right by other men; it includes only the freedom to earn that implementation by one's own effort. | rights | Ayn Rand | |
| 9376b4d | I stand here on the summit of the mountain. I lift my head and I spread my arms. This, my body and spirit, this is the end of the quest. I wished to know the meaning of things. I am the meaning. I wished to find a warrant for being. I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 5a5ac12 | The pursuit of truth is not important. The pursuit of that truth is important which helps you in reaching your goal that is provided you have one. | truth | Ayn Rand | |
| a33b552 | And we know well that there is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 198b586 | A truly selfish man cannot be affected by the approval of others. He doesn't need it. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 120b841 | The right to agree with others is not a problem in any society; it is the right to disagree that is crucial. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 7c50b90 | There was nothing she could say to them--nothing would be heard or answered. What were the weapons, she thought, in a realm where reason was not a weapon any longer? It was a realm she could not enter. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 9441099 | There was no such person as Mrs. Wayne Wilmot; there was only a shell containing the opinions of her friends, the picture post cards she had seen, the novels of country squires she had read; it was this that he had to address, this immateriality which could not hear him or answer, deaf and impersonal like a wad of cotton. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 322b8c8 | As a matter of fact, the person who loves everybody and feels at home everywhere is the true hater of mankind. He expects nothing of men, so no form of depravity can outrage him. | Ayn Rand | ||
| b1731f9 | Nick chided a censor, who wished some books gone, and suggested she scan Fahrenheit 451. For the book-budget cutters, Old Claus had no plan, cause if they could read, they just read Ayn Rand. | christmas jobs librarian library | David Davis | |
| d47ed0a | We are one in all and all in one. There are no men but only the great WE, One, indivisible and forever. | Ayn Rand | ||
| a87c215 | Ethics is not a mystic fantasy--nor a social convention--nor a dispensable, subjective luxury...Ethics is an objective necessity of man's survival--not by the grace of the supernatural nor of your neighbors nor of your whims, but the grace of reality and the nature of life. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 80b4198 | The source of man's rights is not divine law or a congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A ___ and man is man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man's nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product for his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live.. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 4da7ef2 | To live consciously means to seek to be aware of everything that bears on our actions, purposes, values, and goals--to the best of our ability, whatever that ability may be--and to behave in accordance with that which we see and know. | Nathaniel Branden | ||
| 689aac9 | But if I lack respect for and enjoyment of who I am, I have very little to give--except my unfilled needs. In my emotional impoverishment, I tend to see other people essentially as sources of approval or disapproval. I do not appreciate them for who they are in their own right. I see only what they can or cannot do for me. I am not looking for people whom I can admire and with whom I can share the excitement and adventure of life. I am look.. | Nathaniel Branden | ||
| 360e114 | Grave What do you think of my new glasses I asked as I stood under a shade tree before the joined grave of my parents, and what followed was a long silence that descended on the rows of the dead and on the fields and the woods beyond, one of the one hundred kinds of silence according to the Chinese belief, each one distinct from the others, but the differences being so faint that only a few special monks were able to tell them apart. The.. | Billy Collins | ||
| 6344e30 | I can hear the library humming in the night, a choir of authors murmuring inside their books along the unlit, alphabetical shelves, Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son, each one stitched into his own private coat, together forming a low, gigantic chord of language. | library literature poetry reading words | Billy Collins | |
| 469243f | And the reason I am writing this on the back of a manila envelope now that they have left the train together is to tell you that when she turned to lift the large, delicate cello onto the overhead rack, I saw him looking up at her and what she was doing the way the eyes of saints are painted when they are looking up at God | Billy Collins | ||
| f8205ce | Sometimes he fantasised that at the end of his life, he would be shown a home movie of all the roads he had not taken, and where they would have led. | Anne Tyler | ||
| 7583f1d | She saw herself riding in the passenger seat, Sam behind the wheel. Like two of those little peg people in a toy car. Husband peg, wife peg, side by side. Facing the road and not looking at each other; for why would they need to, really, having gone beyond the visible surface long ago. No hope of admiring gazes anymore, no chance of unremitting adoration. Nothing left to show but their plain, true, homely, interior selves, which were actual.. | Anne Tyler | ||
| b4bf5cc | I used to toy with the notion that when we die we find out what our lives have amounted to, finally. I'd never imagined that we could find that out when somebody else dies. | Anne Tyler | ||
| 9fa25a5 | When you realize that quantum mechanics underlies all physical processes, from the fusing of atoms in the sun to the neural firings that constitutes the stuff of thought, the far-reaching implications of the proposal become apparent. It says that there's no such thing as a road untraveled. Yet each such road--each reality--is hidden from all others. | Brian Greene | ||
| 2058d7d | Experience informs intuition. But it does more than that: Experience sets the frame within which we analyze and interpret what we perceive. You would no doubt expect, for instance, that the "wild child" raised by a pack of wolves would interpret the world from a perspective that differs substantially from your own. Even less extreme comparisons, such as those between people raised in very different cultural traditions, serve to underscore t.. | Brian Greene |