One must never allow oneself to acquire an exaggerated sense of one's own importance. There's no necessity to burden oneself with absolutes
("The Fountainhead")
More Quotes from Ayn Rand:
She thought: at this moment, the glass stem between his fingers feels just like the one between mine. We have this much in common.Ayn Rand
The men who are not interested in philosophy need it most urgently they are most helplessly in its power.
Ayn Rand
What did they seek from him What were they after He had never asked anything of them it was they who wished to hold him, they who pressed a claim on him - and they seemed to have the form of affection, but it was a form which he found harder to endure than any sort of hatred. He despised causeless affection, just as he despised unearned wealth. They professed to love him for some unknown reason and they ignored all the things for which he could wish to be loved. He wondered what response they could hope to obtain from him in such manner - if his response was what they wanted. And it was, he thought else why those constant complaints, those unceasing accusations about his indifference Why that chronic air of suspicion, as if they were waiting to be hurt He had never had a desire to hurt them, but he had always felt their defensive, reproachful expectation they seemed wounded by anything he said, it was not a matter of his words or actions, it was almost . . . almost as if they were wounded by the mere fact of his being. Don't start imagining the insane - he told himself severely, struggling to face the riddle with the strictest of his ruthless sense of justice. He could not condemn them without understanding and he could not understand.
Ayn Rand
To say "I love you" one must first be able to say the "I."
Ayn Rand
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
The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other - until one day when they are suddenly declared to be the country's official ideology.
Ayn Rand
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Based on Topics: Sense & Perception QuotesHumor is very very risky, particularly for a candidate, unless he's been in so long that it just doesn't matter, and he's not running for president. But it's just that people are so sensitive and so touchy, and you're just going to upset somebody without ever realizing it.
Mark Russell
I believe in the freedom of God's sons and daughters.
Pat Buckley
All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.
Samuel Beckett