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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| bccdbe3 | If some men attempt to survive by means of brute force or fraud, by looting, robbing, cheating or enslaving the men who produce, it still remains true that their survival is made possible only by their victims, only by the men who choose to think and to produce the goods which they, the looters, are seizing. Such looters are parasites incapable of survival, who exist by destroying those who are capable, those who are pursuing a course of ac.. | Ayn Rand | ||
| f8e60da | We went on, cutting through the branches, and it was as if we were swimming through a sea of leaves, with the bushes as waves rising and falling and rising around us, and flinging their green sprays high to the treetops. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 7659fd3 | A building has integrity, just as a man and just as seldom! It must be true to its own idea, have its own form, and serve its own purpose!"." | Ayn Rand | ||
| 7c6a761 | She found a deep sense of fitness in the fact that here, among people, they should be strangers; strangers and enemies. She thought, these people can think of many things he and I are to each other--except what we are. It made the moments she remembered greater, the moments not touched by the sight of others, by the words of others, not even by their knowledge. | Ayn Rand | ||
| d83cc15 | Hence the sterile, uninspiring futility of a great many theoretical discussions of ethics, and the resentment which many people feel towards such discussions: moral principles remain in their minds as floating abstractions, offering them a goal they cannot grasp and demanding that they reshape their souls in its image, thus leaving them with a burden of undefinable moral guilt. | ethics philosophy | Ayn Rand | |
| aa080d3 | She felt a bored indifference toward the immediate world around her, toward other children and adults alike. She took it as a regrettable accident, to be borne patiently for a while, that she happened to be imprisoned among people who were dull. She had caught a glimpse of another world and she knew that it existed somewhere, the world that had created trains, bridges, telegraph wires and signal lights winking in the night. She had to wait,.. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 135a749 | the best is a matter of standards--and I set my own standards. | howard-roark standards the-fountainhead | Ayn Rand | |
| 26733de | I take the only desire one can really permit oneself. Freedom, Alvah, freedom." "You call that freedom?" "To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing." | freedom independence the-fountainhead | Ayn Rand | |
| d502f55 | I had been opposed to the practice of dedicating books; I had held that a book is addressed to any reader who proves worthy of it. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 1838f6c | But a few understand that building is a great symbol we live in our minds, and existence is the attempt to bring that life into physical reality, to state it in gesture and form. For the man who understands this, a house he owns is a statement of his life. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 989147a | Don't tell me your evaluation. Give me the facts. | facts hank-rearden | Ayn Rand | |
| 847f351 | Every form of happiness is private. Our greatest moments are personal, self-motivated, not to be touched. The things which are sacred or precious to us are the things we withdraw from promiscuous sharing. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 9c47bf1 | You can fake virtue for an audience. You can't fake it in your own eyes. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 6eb57d5 | A thing is not high if one can reach it; it is not great if one can reason it; it is not deep if one can see its bottom. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 108f5f8 | We are nothing mankind is all | Ayn Rand | ||
| 0f3375e | She watched the tunnels as they flowed past: bare walls of concrete, a net of pipes and wires, a web of rails that went off into black holes where green and red lights hung as distant drops of color. There was nothing else to dilute it, so that one could admire naked purpose and the ingenuity that had achieved it. | progress purpose technology utility | Ayn Rand | |
| 1ea2318 | He wondered whether he really liked his mother. But she was his mother and this fact was recognized by everybody as meaning automatically that he loved her, and so he took for granted that whatever he felt for her was love. He did not know whether there was any reason why he should respect her judgment. She was his mother; this was supposed to take the place of reasons. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 7755b07 | When they lay in bed together it was--as it had to be, as the nature of the act demanded--an act of violence. It was surrender, made the more complete by the force of their resistance. It was an act of tension, as the great things on earth are things of tension. It was tense as electricity, the force fed on resistance, rushing through wires of metal stretched tight; it was tense as water made into power by the restraining violence of a dam... | dominique-francon howard-roark the-fountainhead | Ayn Rand | |
| 1c6e329 | I don't make comparisons. I never think of myself in relation to anyone else. I just refuse to measure myself as part of anything. I'm an utter egotist. | howard-roark the-fountainhead | Ayn Rand | |
| 157db9c | Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life. Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself. | francisco-d-anconia sex | Ayn Rand | |
| ebdf7a1 | 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. The rest are no concern of mine; it is not me or The Fountainhead that they will betray: it is their own souls. AYN RAND New York, May 1968 | Ayn Rand | ||
| 61e8ee2 | You don't care what others think - which might be understandable. But you don't care even to make them think as you do?" "No." "But that's...that's monstrous." "Is it? Probably. I couldn't say." | Ayn Rand | ||
| d31493b | Our name is Equality 7-2521, as it is written on the iron bracelet which all men wear on their left wrists with their names upon it. We are twenty-one years old. We are six feet tall, and this is a burden, for there are not many men who are six feet tall. Ever have the Teachers and the Leaders pointed to us and frowned and said: "There is evil in your bones, Equality 7-2521, for your body has grown beyond the bodies of your brothers." But w.. | Ayn Rand | ||
| c42e3c5 | You don't have to see through the eyes of others, hold onto yours, stand on your own judgment, you know that what is, is--say it aloud, like the holiest of prayers, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. | dagny-taggart judgment | Ayn Rand | |
| 8834e8c | We alone, of the thousands who walk this earth, we alone in this hour are doing a work which has no purpose save that we wish to do it. | freedom-of-thought pride | Ayn Rand | |
| 4fa783d | If life is a process of self-sustaining action, then this is the distinctly human mode of action and survival: to think--to produce--to meet the challenges of existence by a never-ending effort and inventiveness. | Ayn Rand | ||
| e065094 | I don't like the thing that's happening to people, Miss Taggart. I don't know. But I've watched them here for twenty years and I've seen the change. They used to rush through here, and it was wonderful to watch, it was the hurry of men who knew where they were going and were eager to get there. Now they're hurrying because they are afraid. It's not a purpose that drives them, its fear. They're not going anywhere, they're escaping. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 3a71a5f | Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it--that no substitute can do your thinking--that the vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousn.. | evil good happiness independence john-galt life man mind morality morals objectivism pain philosophy pursuit-of-happiness rational reason think thinking truth values virtue wisdom | Ayn Rand | |
| 517681b | Observe the nature of today's alleged peace movements. Professing love and concern for the survival of mankind, they keep screaming that the nuclear-weapons race should be stopped, that armed force should be abolished as a means of settling disputes among nations, and that war should be outlawed in the name of humanity. Yet these same peace movements do not oppose dictatorships; the political views of their members range through all shades .. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 8c82cad | The leaves had edges of silver that trembled and rippled like a river of green and fire flowing high above us. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 3297c43 | Happiness is the successful state of life, pain is an agent of death. Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values. A morality that dares to tell you to find happiness in the renunciation of your happiness--to value the failure of your values--is an insolent negation of morality. | evil good happiness john-galt life man mind morality morals objectivism philosophy pursuit-of-happiness rational reason think thinking values virtue | Ayn Rand | |
| 2a3f4ca | As a basic step of self-esteem, learn to treat as the mark of a cannibal any man's demand for your help. To demand it is to claim that your life is his property - and loathsome as such claim might be, there's something still more loathsome: your agreement. Do you ask if it's ever proper to help another man? No- if he claims it as his right or as a moral duty that you owe him. Yes- if such is your own desire based on your own selfish pleasur.. | self-esteem suffering trade values virtue | Ayn Rand | |
| 6659a53 | You have sacrificed justice to mercy. You have sacrificed independence to unity. You have sacrificed reason to faith. You have sacrificed wealth to need. You have sacrificed self-esteem to self-denial. You have sacrificed happiness to duty. | john-galt life morals philosophy sacrifice values | Ayn Rand | |
| 34fa147 | I'm not capable of suffering completely. I never have. It goes only down to a certain point and then it stops. As long as there is that untouched point, it's not really pain. | pain suffering the-fountainhead | Ayn Rand | |
| f65b159 | But, in fact, a person's sexual choice is the result and sum of their fundamental convictions. Tell me what a person finds sexually attractive and I will tell you their entire philosophy of life. | convictions life philosophy sex | Ayn Rand | |
| ca3adc4 | He's not really struggling even for material wealth, but for the second-hander's delusion--prestige. A stamp of approval, not his own. He can find no joy in the struggle and no joy when he has succeeded. | joy the-fountainhead | Ayn Rand | |
| f74d0d8 | He demanded of all people the one thing he had never granted anybody: obedience. | Ayn Rand | ||
| c2115c3 | The structures were austere and simple, until one looked at them and realized what work, what complexity of method, what tension of thought had achieved the simplicity. | complex simple the-fountainhead | Ayn Rand | |
| 28d4e45 | All your life, you have heard yourself denounced, not for your faults, but for your greatest virtues. You have been hated, not for your mistakes, but for your achievements. You have been scorned for all those qualities of character which are your highest pride. You have been called selfish for the courage of acting on your own judgment and bearing sole responsibility for your own life. You have been called arrogant for your independent mind.. | francisco-d-anconia hank-rearden | Ayn Rand | |
| 0c27d27 | He saw an evening when he sat slumped across his desk in that office. It was late and his staff had left; so he could lie there alone, unwitnessed. He was tired. It was as if he had run a race against his own body, and all the exhaustion of years, which he refused to acknowledge, had caught him at once and flattened him against the desk top. He felt nothing, except the desire not to move. He did not have the strength to feel--not even to su.. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 0e63818 | No wonder you rise in the middle of the night to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war. No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted out of a love poem that you used to know by heart. | forgetfulness | Billy Collins | |
| b808c0c | You trip over a word while carrying a tray of vocabulary out to the pool only to discover that broken glass is a good topic. | poetry verse | Billy Collins | |
| b657a28 | It is possible to be struck by a meteor or a single-engine plane while reading in a chair at home. Safes drop from rooftops and flatten the odd pedestrian mostly within the panels of the comics, but still, we know it is possible, as well as the flash of summer lightning, the thermos toppling over, spilling out on the grass. And we know the message can be delivered from within. The heart, no valentine, decides to quit after lunch, the power .. | life living poetry | Billy Collins | |
| 015e174 | This is a specific person, do you understand? Not just some . I want to make sure you realize that. | Anne Tyler |