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.
More Quotes from Ayn Rand:
No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind that has to acquire it. It is only with your own knowledge that you can deal. It is only your own knowledge that you can claim to possess or ask others to consider. Your mind is your only judge of truth and if others dissent from your verdict, reality is the court of final appeal. Nothing but a man's mind can perform that complex, delicate, crucial process of identification which is thinking. Nothing can direct the process but his own judgment. Nothing can direct his judgment but his moral integrity.Ayn Rand
Many words have been granted me, and some are wise and some are false, but only three are holy 'I will it'
Ayn Rand
That love is reverence, and worship, and glory, and the upward glance. Not a bandage for dirty sores. But they don't know it. Those who speak of love most promiscuously are the ones who've never felt it. They make some sort of feeble stew out of sympathy, compassion, comtempt, and general indiference, and they call it love. Once you've felt what it means to love as you and I know it - the total passion for the total height - you are unable of anything else.
Ayn Rand
The worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt.
Ayn Rand
In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it's yours.
Ayn Rand
If a life could have a theme song and I believe every worthwhile one has mine is a religion, an obsession, a mania or all of these expressed in one word individualism. I was born with that obsession, and I've never seen and do not know now a cause more worthy, more misunderstood, more seemingly hopeless and tragically needed.
Ayn Rand
Readers Who Like This Quotation Also Like:
Based on Topics: Actions Quotes, Affection Quotes, Complaints Quotes, Desire Quotes, Hatred Quotes, Justice Quotes, Money & Wealth QuotesBased on Keywords: accusations, causeless, professed, reproachful, strictest, unceasing, unearned
And I tell ya, when I sit in that sound booth and started reading the script and starting to get into the character, man, it's an easy jump for me, because I understand what it's all about.
Lawrence Taylor
The basic guarantees of our Constitution are warrants for the here and now, and unless there is an overwhelmingly compelling reason, they are to be promptly fulfilled.
Arthur J. Goldberg
For neither life nor nature cares if justice is ever done or not.
Patricia Highsmith