Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” Quotes (79 Quotes)

A man's sexual choice is the result and the sum of his fundamental convictions.... He will always be attracted to the woman who reflects his deepest vision of himself, the woman whose surrender permits him to experience a sense of self-esteem. The man who is proudly certain of his own value, will want the highest type of woman he can find, the woman he admires, the strongest, the hardest to conquer--because only the possession of a heroine will give him the sense of an achievement.

He walked, groping for a sentence that hung in his mind as an empty shape. He could neither fill it or dismiss it.

Joy is the goal of existence, and joy is not to be stumbled upon, but to be achieved, and the act of treason is to let its vision drown in the swamp of the moment's torture.

She was incapable of love for any object not of her own choice and she resented anyone's demand for it.

We are born into this world unarmed - our mind is our only weapon.

A viler evil than to murder a man, is to sell him suicide as an act of virtue.

I do not seek the good of others as a sanction for my right to exist, nor do I recognize the good of others as a justification for their seizure of my property or their destruction of my life.

Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life.

She watched the prairies the rivers, the towns slipping past at an untouchable distance below - and she noted that the sense of detachment one feels when looking at the earth from a plane was the same sense she felt when looking at people: only her distance from people seemed longer. - Dagny Taggart

We are on strike against martyrdom-and against the moral code that demands it. We are on strike against those who believe that one man must exist for the sake of another. We are on strike against the morality of cannibals, be it practiced in body or in spirit. We will not deal with men on any terms but ours-and our terms are a moral code which holds that man is an end in himself and not the means to any end of others.

And no power on earth could tell whether their blankly indifferent eyes were shutters protecting hidden treasures at the bottom of shafts no longer to be mined, or were merely gaping holes of the parasite's emptiness never to be filled.

I do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and I do not live in chronic dread of disaster. It is no happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that I regard as the abnormal exception in Human Life.

Man has the power to act as his own destroyer and that is he has acted through most of history.

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.

What greater wealth is there than to own your life and to spend it on growing? Every living thing must grow. It can't stand still. It must grow or perish.

Any work is creative work if done by a thinking mind.

I feel that others live up to me, if they want me.

Married people dont look like they have bedrooms on their minds when they look at each other. In this world, either you're virtuous or you enjoy yourself. Not both...Not both.

That was the real sentence imposed upon him, he thought - to discover what idea, what simple idea available to the simplest man, had made mankind accept the doctrines that led it to self-destruction.

What is man? He's just a collection of chemicals with delusions of grandeur.

At a time like this, we can't afford the luxury of thinking!

I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle.

Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices

The course led them to the moment when, in answer to the highest of one's values, one's spirit makes one's body become the tribute, recasting it--as proof, as sanction, as reward--into a single sensation of such intensity of joy that no other sanction of one's existence is necessary.

When a man feels fear without reason, you call him to the attention of a psychiatrist; you are not so careful to protect the meaning, the nature and the dignity of love.

But there are people who'll try to hurt you through the good they see in you--knowing that it's the good, needing it and punishing you for it. Don't let it break you when you discover that.

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.

Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants.

The nation which once held the creed that greatness is achieved by production, is now told that it is achieved by squalor.

When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind - and it's roper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression.

But you see, the measure of hell you're able to endure is the measure of your love.

I think it's a sin to sit down and let your life go without making a try for it.

Never think of pain or danger or enemies a moment longer than is necessary to fight them.

The view that man was ever to be drawn by some vision of the unattainable shining ahead, doomed ever to aspire, but not to achieve, my life and my values could not bring me to that.

When I die I hope to go to heaven--whatever that is--and I want to be able to afford the price of admission.

By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man-every man-is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose

I think, therefore I'll think.

No principle ever filled anybody's milk bottle

The world is ours, whenever we choose to claim it, by virtue and grace of the fact that ours is the Morality of Life.

When one acts on pity against justice, it is the good whom one punishes for the sake of the evil; when one saves the guilty from suffering, it is the innocent whom one forces to suffer. There is no escape from justice, nothing can be unearned and unpaid for in the universe, neither in matter nor in spirit-and if the guilty do not pay, then the innocent have to pay it.

Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade...

If one's actions are honest, one does not need the predated confidence of others.

Only if one feels immensely important she had told him, can one feel truly light.

The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it's yours.

Why had we let it go? Why had we both been condemned...to an exile among dreary strangers who had made us give up all desire for rest, for friendship, for the sound of human voices? Could I now reclaim a single hour spent talking to my brother, Philip, and give it to Ken Daggart? Who made it our duty to accept, as the only reward for our work, the gray torture of pretending love for those who roused nothing but contempt?

Did I feel a physical desire for him? I did. Was I moved by a passion of my body? I was. Have I experienced the most violent form of sensual pleasure? I have.

If the rest of them can survive only by destroying us, then why should we wish them to survive? . . . Nothing can make it moral to destroy the best. One can't be punished for being good. One can't be penalized for ability.

Only the man who extols the purity of love devoid of desire, is capable of the depravity of a desire devoid of love.

There are no contradictions. If you find one, check your premises.

You have no choice about your capacity to feel that something is good for you or evil, but what you will consider good or evil, what will give you joy or pain, what you will love or hate, desire or fear, depends on your standard of value.