When facing society, the man most concerned, the man who is to do the most and contribute the most, has the least to say. It's taken for granted that he has no voice and his reasons he could offer are rejected in advance as prejudiced--since no speech is ever considered, but only the speaker. It's so much easier to pass judgment on a man than an idea.
("The Fountainhead")
More Quotes from Ayn Rand:
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.Ayn Rand
Why have you been staring at me ever since we met? Because I'm not the Gail Wynand you'd heard about. You see, I love you. And love is exception-making. If you were in love you'd want to be broken, trampled, ordered, dominated, because that's the impossible, in the inconceivable for you in your relations with people. That would be the one gift, the great exception you'd want to offer the man you loved. But it wouldn't be easy for you.
Ayn Rand
He thought of all the living species that train their young in the art of survival, the cats who teach their kittens to hunt, the birds who spend such strident efforts on teaching their fledglings to fly - yet man, whose tool of survival is the mind, does not merely fail to teach a child to think, but devotes the child's education to the purpose of destroying his brain, of convincing him that thought is futile and evil, before he has started to think ... Men would shudder, he thought, if they saw a mother bird plucking the feathers from the wings of her young, then pushing him out of the nest to struggle for survival - yet that was what they did to their children.
Ayn Rand
You will follow me, if we are what we are, you and I, if we live, if the world exists, if you know the meaning of this moment and can't let it slip by, as others let it slip, into the senselessness of the unwilled and unreached.
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 lust that drives others to enslave an empire, had become, in her limits, a passion for power over him. She had set out to break him, as if, unable to equal his value, she could surpass it by destroying it, as if the measure of his greatness would thus become the measure of hers, as if the vandal who smashed a statue were greater than the artist who had made it, as if the murderer who killed a child were greater than the mother who had given it birth.
Ayn Rand
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Based on Topics: Idea Quotes, Man Quotes, Society & Civilization Quotes, Speech QuotesBased on Keywords: prejudiced--since
The art of motion pictures is pictorial and language comes a distant second.
Jean-Jacques Annaud
There exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Many people in the world today are not starving because there is an inherent inability to produce food, they are starving because they are caught in the middle of political fights and blockades that have been used as weapons.
Ralph Merkle