1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3037
3038
3039
3040
3041
3346
3522
5443
5619
6757
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 9c425e3 | Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies...It is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the concept of 'Value' possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil. | evil good john-galt life man mind morality morals objectivism philosophy pursuit-of-happiness reason think thinking values virtue | Ayn Rand | |
| 6bc9e13 | An emotion as such tells you nothing about reality, beyond the fact that something makes you feel something. Without a ruthlessly honest commitment to introspection--to the conceptual identification of your inner states--you will not discover what you feel, what arouses the feeling, and whether your feeling is an appropriate response to the facts of reality, or a mistaken response, or a vicious illusion produced by years of self-deception. .. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 6c377d2 | I always know what I want. And when you know what you want - you go toward it. Sometimes you go very fast, and sometimes only an inch a year. Perhaps you feel happier when you go fast. I don't know. I've forgotten the difference long ago, because it really doesn't matter, so long as you move. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 2a3d73d | My hands . . . My spirit . . . My sky . . . My forest . . . This earth of mine . . . | Ayn Rand | ||
| 783bf4e | Whatever road I take, the guiding star is within me; the guiding star and the loadstone which point the way. They point in but one direction. They point to me. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 52c1a27 | Happiness is self-contained and self-sufficient. Happy men have no time and no use for you. Happy men are free men. | happy the-fountainhead | Ayn Rand | |
| 3c53862 | The free market is not a creed or an ideology that political conservatives, libertarians, and Ayn Rand acolytes want Americans to take on faith. The free market is simply a measurement. The free market tells us what people are willing to pay for a given thing at a given moment. That's all the free market does. The free market is a bathroom scale. We may not like what we see when we step on the bathroom scale, but we can't pass a law making .. | P.J. O'Rourke | ||
| 30ec85e | We are one in all and all in one. There are no men but only the great WE, One, indivisible and forever."--" | Ayn Rand | ||
| 7c1e0bb | And because she worshipped joy, Kira seldom laughed and did not go to see comedies in theaters. And because she felt a profound rebellion against the weighty, the tragic, the solemn, Kira had a solemn reverence for those songs of defiant gaiety. | defiance joy rebellion reverence tragic | Ayn Rand | |
| 7f59f06 | Moments later, when she saw the look of control returning to his face, she said, "Don't ever get angry at a man for stating the truth." | Ayn Rand | ||
| cf96110 | By this point in history--after the 2008 collapse of Wall Street and in the midst of layers of ecological crises--free market fundamentalists should, by all rights, be exiled to a similarly irrelevant status, left to fondle their copies of Milton Friedman's Free to Choose and Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged in obscurity. They are saved from this ignominious fate only because their ideas about corporate liberation, no matter how demonstrably at wa.. | Naomi Klein | ||
| 5b5bdfe | He thought of how convincingly he could describe this scene to friends and make them envy the fullness of his contentment. Why couldn't he convince himself? He had everything he'd ever wanted. He had wanted superiority--and for the last year he had been the undisputed leader of his profession. He had wanted fame--and he had five thick albums of clippings. He had wanted wealth--and he had enough to insure luxury for the rest of his life. He .. | Ayn Rand | ||
| e50cb38 | Keating stood still, because he understood for the first time what it was that artists spoke about when they spoke of beauty. | beauty | Ayn Rand | |
| 6383981 | Oh, but I am quite resigned to taking second place in the shadow of my husband. I am humbly aware that the wife of a great man has to be contented with reflected glory - don't you think so Miss Taggart?" "No," said Dagny, "I don't." | Ayn Rand | ||
| 25e8574 | When the name of Gail Wynand became a threat in the publishing world, a group of newspaper owners took him aside-at a city charity affair which all had to attend-and reproached him for what they called hid debasement of the public taste. "It is not my function" said Wynand, "to help people preserve a self-respect they haven't got. You give them what they profess to like in public, I give them what they really like. Honesty is the best polic.. | public-opinion | Ayn Rand | |
| 70c205c | I fantasize about killing people all the time. I think about how easy it would be. What if I just started showing up to Kitan rallies with an I-beam? Knock down the capitol building, force them to pass Universal Health Care, stuff aevery Ayn Rand fanatic into a big mason jar and hurl them into the sun. I could do it, you know. I really could. And then there's these people with their fucking sneers going 'You're a monster! You're a thug! You.. | female-hero killing killing-people people saving-the-world superhero superheroes | Brennan Lee Mulligan | |
| 2482d79 | What subjectivism is in the realm of ethics, collectivism is in the realm of politics. Just as the notion that "anything I do is right because I chose to do it," is not a moral principle, but a negation of morality--so the notion that "anything society does is right because society chose to do it," is not a moral principle, but a negation of moral principles an the banishment of morality from social issues." | Ayn Rand | ||
| b9392ac | If one doesn't respect oneself one can have neither love nor respect for others. | Ayn Rand | ||
| c07f372 | But we, Equality 7-2521, are glad to be living. If this is a vice, then we wish no virtue. | Ayn Rand | ||
| e24e6b6 | The theory that holds "good blood" or "bad blood" as a moral-intellectual criterion , can lead to nothing but torrents of blood in practice." | Ayn Rand | ||
| 73463c3 | There are two aspects of man's existence which are the special province and expression of his sense of life: love and art. I am referring here to romantic love, in the serious meaning of that term--as distinguished from the superficial infatuations of those whose sense of life is devoid of any consistent values, i.e., of any lasting emotions other than fear. Love is a response to values. It is with a person's sense of life that one falls in.. | cognition emotions love | Ayn Rand | |
| 611c3ca | I win by means of nothing but logic and I surrender to nothing but logic. I do not surrender my reason or deal with men who surrender theirs. | logic reason | Ayn Rand | |
| 9f9df66 | It's not just the kind of work you do; I wouldn't care, if you were an exhibitionist who's being different as a stunt, as a lark, just to attract attention to himself. It's a smart racket, to oppose the crowd and amuse it and collect admission to the side show. If you did that, I wouldn't worry. But it's not that. You love your work. God help you, you love it! And that's the curse. That's the brand on your forehead for all of them to see. Y.. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 14d329c | she had nothing to hide from him, nothing to keep unstated, everything was granted, answered, found. | howard-roark the-fountainhead | Ayn Rand | |
| be1d63a | Miss Taggart, do you know the hallmark of the second-rater? It's resentment of another man's achievement. Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own-they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal-for a mind to respect and achievement to admire. They bare their teeth at you from out of their rat holes, thinking that you take pleasure in l.. | Ayn Rand | ||
| c14a698 | No one's happiness but my own is in my power to achieve or to destroy. | happiness john-galt | Ayn Rand | |
| 8a1d225 | Love is the ultimate form of recognition one grants to superlative values. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 228b50e | It was useless to argue, she thought, and to wonder about people who would neither refute an argument nor accept it. | Ayn Rand | ||
| bad5d56 | A viler evil than to murder a man, is to sell him suicide as an act of virtue. A viler evil than to throw a man into a sacrificial furnace, is to demand that he leap in, of his own will, and that he build the furnace, besides. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 288215c | Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion--when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing--when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors--when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don.. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 00934d4 | There are no defenders of man's mind--in the world's greatest scientific-technological civilization. All that is left is a battle between the mystics of spirit and the mystics of muscle--between men guided by their feelings and men guided by their reflexes. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 065aec2 | Failing to have a cake after one has eaten it, is not a "compromise." | Ayn Rand | ||
| d4aa10e | Rationality is the recognition of the fact that existence exists, that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it, which is thinking--that the mind is one's only judge of values and one's only guide of action--that reason is an absolute that permits no compromise--that a concession to the irrational invalidates one's consciousness and turns it from the task of perceiving to the task of faking .. | evil good happiness john-galt life man mind morality morals objectivism pain philosophy pursuit-of-happiness rational reason think thinking truth values virtue wisdom | Ayn Rand | |
| 51335c1 | We are those who do not disconnect the values of their minds from the actions of their bodies, those who do not leave their values to empty dreams, but bring them into existence, those who give material form to thoughts, and reality to values. | dagny-taggart hank-rearden sex | Ayn Rand | |
| f1dabf0 | At every step of her rise, she did the work long before she was granted the title. It was like advancing through empty rooms. Nobody opposed her, yet nobody approved of her progress. | Ayn Rand | ||
| a514c2b | Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification. | consciousness existence john-galt life man mind morality morals objectivism philosophy pursuit-of-happiness rational reason think thinking truth values virtue wisdom | Ayn Rand | |
| 4c555ad | Are you seeking to know what is wrong with the world? All the disasters that have wrecked your world, came from your leaders' attempt to evade the fact that A is A. All the secret evil you dread to face within you and all the pain you have ever endured, came from your own attempt to evade the fact that A is A. | evil good john-galt life man mind morality morals objectivism philosophy pursuit-of-happiness rational reason think thinking truth values virtue wisdom | Ayn Rand | |
| 6344423 | The only guilt of the victims, he thought, had been that they accepted it as guilt. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 6628f98 | I do not wish to work in a world that regards me as a slave. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 90f3534 | What is my joy if all hands, even the unclean, can reach into it? What is my wisdom, if even the fools can dictate to me? What is my freedom, if all creatures, even the botched and impotent, are my masters? What is my life, if I am but to bow, to agree, and to obey? | Ayn Rand | ||
| 0b791c3 | The basic purpose of art is not to teach, but to show--to hold up to man a concretized image of his nature and his place in the universe. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 4aa9774 | At this moment (letting a breeze ripple through her fingers like warm water), Maggie felt that the entire business of time's passing was more than she could bear. | Anne Tyler | ||
| 8d906e0 | First, her tippet made of tulle, easily lifted off her shoulders and laid on the back of a wooden chair. And her bonnet, the bow undone with a light forward pull. Then the long white dress, a more complicated matter with mother-of-pearl buttons down the back, so tiny and numerous that it takes forever before my hands can part the fabric, like a swimmer's dividing water, and slip inside. You will want to know that she was standing by an open.. | poetry | Billy Collins | |
| 9307d5c | Is there a better method of departure by night than this quiet bon voyage with an open book, the sole companion who has come to see you off, to wave you into the dark waters beyond language? | language poetry reading words | Billy Collins |