Ayn Rand
"There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil."
"People create their own questions because they are afraid to look straight. All you have to do is look straight and see the road, and when you see it, don't sit looking at it - walk."
"The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see.
"You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality."
"The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live."
"I regret nothing. There have been things I missed, but I ask no questions, because I have loved it, such as it has been, even the moments of emptiness, even the unanswered-and that I loved it, that is the unanswered in my life."
"A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others."
"I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."
"Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting for us in our graves - or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth."
"Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone."
"The ladder of success is best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity."
"To say "I love you" one must first be able to say the "I."
"Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. 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. Show me the person they sleep with and I will tell you their valuation of themselves. No matter what corruption they're taught about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which they cannot perform for any motive but their own enjoyment - just try to think of performing it in a spirit of selfless charity! - an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in self-exultation, only on the confidence of being desired and being worthy of desire. It is an act that forces them to stand naked in spirit, as well as in body, and accept their real ego as their standard of value. They will always be attracted to the person who reflects their deepest vision of themselves, the person whose surrender permits them to experience - or to fake - a sense of self-esteem .. Love is our response to our highest values - and can be nothing else."
"The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me."
"If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders - What would you tell him?"
"I could die for you. But I couldn't, and wouldn't, live for you."
"Learn to value yourself, which means: fight for your happiness."
"My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose."
...Do you know what I am? I thought of it, because it should have been unthinkable. For that degrading need, which would never touch you, I have never wanted anyone but you ...I hadn't known what it was like, to want it, until I saw you for the first time. I had thought : Not I, I couldn't be broken by it ...Since then ...For two years ...With not a moments respite ...Do you know what it's like, to want it? Would you wish to hear what I thought when I looked at you ...When I lay awake at night ...When I hear your voice over a telephone wire ...When I worked, but could not drive it away? ...To bring you down to things you can't conceive - and to know that it's I who have done it. To reduce you to a body, to teach you an animal's pleasure, to see you need it, to see you asking me for it, to see your wonderful spirit dependent upon the obscenity of your need. To watch you as you are, as you face the world with your clean, proud strength - then to see you, in my bed, submitting to any infamous whim I may devise, to any act which I'll preform for the sole purpose of watching your dishonor and to which you'll submit for the sake of an unspeakable sensation ...I want you - and may I be damned for it!
"There’s nothing as significant as a human face. Nor as eloquent. We can never really know another person, except by our first glance at him. Because, in that glance, we know everything. Even though we’re not always wise enough to unravel the knowledge."
"Patience is always rewarded and romance is always round the corner!"
"But why should you care what people will say? All you have to do is please yourself."
"Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life."
"I take no pride in hopeless longing; I wouldn't hold a stillborn aspiration. I'd want to have it, to make it, to live it."
"When I die I hope to go to heaven--whatever that is--and I want to be able to afford the price of admission."
"In this world, either you're virtuous or you enjoy yourself. Not both, lady, not both."
"Within the extent of your knowledge, you are right."
"Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man's values, it has to be earned."
"What is man? He's just a collection of chemicals with delusions of grandeur."
"Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be left waiting for us in our graves-or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth."
"He, too, stood looking at her for a moment--and it seemed to her that it was not a look of greeting after an absence, but the look of someone who had thought of her every day of that year. She could not be certain, it was only an instant, so brief that just as she caught it, he was turning..."
"She thought: at this moment, the glass stem between his fingers feels just like the one between mine. We have this much in common."
"My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute."
"She did not know the nature of her loneliness. The only words that named it were: This is not the world I expected."
"She smiled. She knew she was dying. But it did not matter any longer. She had known something which no human words could ever tell and she knew it now. She had been awaiting it and she felt it, as if it had been, as if she had lived it. Life had been, if only because she had known it could be, and she felt it now as a hymn without sound, deep under the little whole that dripped red drops into the snow, deeper than that from which the red drops came. A moment or an eternity- did it matter? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist. She smiled, her last smile, to so much that had been possible."
"You have been the one encounter in my life that can never be repeated."
"People create their own questions because they are afraid to look straight. All you have to do is look straight and see the road, and when you see it, don't sit looking at it - walk."
"The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see.
"You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality."
"The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live."
"I regret nothing. There have been things I missed, but I ask no questions, because I have loved it, such as it has been, even the moments of emptiness, even the unanswered-and that I loved it, that is the unanswered in my life."
"A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others."
"I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."
"Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting for us in our graves - or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth."
"Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone."
"The ladder of success is best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity."
"To say "I love you" one must first be able to say the "I."
"Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. 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. Show me the person they sleep with and I will tell you their valuation of themselves. No matter what corruption they're taught about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which they cannot perform for any motive but their own enjoyment - just try to think of performing it in a spirit of selfless charity! - an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in self-exultation, only on the confidence of being desired and being worthy of desire. It is an act that forces them to stand naked in spirit, as well as in body, and accept their real ego as their standard of value. They will always be attracted to the person who reflects their deepest vision of themselves, the person whose surrender permits them to experience - or to fake - a sense of self-esteem .. Love is our response to our highest values - and can be nothing else."
"The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me."
"If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders - What would you tell him?"
"I could die for you. But I couldn't, and wouldn't, live for you."
"Learn to value yourself, which means: fight for your happiness."
"My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose."
...Do you know what I am? I thought of it, because it should have been unthinkable. For that degrading need, which would never touch you, I have never wanted anyone but you ...I hadn't known what it was like, to want it, until I saw you for the first time. I had thought : Not I, I couldn't be broken by it ...Since then ...For two years ...With not a moments respite ...Do you know what it's like, to want it? Would you wish to hear what I thought when I looked at you ...When I lay awake at night ...When I hear your voice over a telephone wire ...When I worked, but could not drive it away? ...To bring you down to things you can't conceive - and to know that it's I who have done it. To reduce you to a body, to teach you an animal's pleasure, to see you need it, to see you asking me for it, to see your wonderful spirit dependent upon the obscenity of your need. To watch you as you are, as you face the world with your clean, proud strength - then to see you, in my bed, submitting to any infamous whim I may devise, to any act which I'll preform for the sole purpose of watching your dishonor and to which you'll submit for the sake of an unspeakable sensation ...I want you - and may I be damned for it!
"There’s nothing as significant as a human face. Nor as eloquent. We can never really know another person, except by our first glance at him. Because, in that glance, we know everything. Even though we’re not always wise enough to unravel the knowledge."
"Patience is always rewarded and romance is always round the corner!"
"But why should you care what people will say? All you have to do is please yourself."
"Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life."
"I take no pride in hopeless longing; I wouldn't hold a stillborn aspiration. I'd want to have it, to make it, to live it."
"When I die I hope to go to heaven--whatever that is--and I want to be able to afford the price of admission."
"In this world, either you're virtuous or you enjoy yourself. Not both, lady, not both."
"Within the extent of your knowledge, you are right."
"Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man's values, it has to be earned."
"What is man? He's just a collection of chemicals with delusions of grandeur."
"Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be left waiting for us in our graves-or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth."
"He, too, stood looking at her for a moment--and it seemed to her that it was not a look of greeting after an absence, but the look of someone who had thought of her every day of that year. She could not be certain, it was only an instant, so brief that just as she caught it, he was turning..."
"She thought: at this moment, the glass stem between his fingers feels just like the one between mine. We have this much in common."
"My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute."
"She did not know the nature of her loneliness. The only words that named it were: This is not the world I expected."
"She smiled. She knew she was dying. But it did not matter any longer. She had known something which no human words could ever tell and she knew it now. She had been awaiting it and she felt it, as if it had been, as if she had lived it. Life had been, if only because she had known it could be, and she felt it now as a hymn without sound, deep under the little whole that dripped red drops into the snow, deeper than that from which the red drops came. A moment or an eternity- did it matter? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist. She smiled, her last smile, to so much that had been possible."
"You have been the one encounter in my life that can never be repeated."
