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


    He had to say; words were a lens to focus one's mind, and he could not use words for anything else tonight.


    Rationality is the recognition of the fact that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it.


    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.


    He has once built his fortune, starting out with empty hands; now he had to rebuild his life, starting out with an empty spirit

    It is this insistence of man upon meaning that makes him so difficult. Once he realizes that he is of no importance whatever in the vast scheme of the universe, that no possible significance can be attached to his activities, that it does not matter whether he lives or dies, he will become much more … tractable.

    She did not know the nature of her loneliness. The only words that named it were: This is not the world I expected.

    Things stood still, not a leaf trembled on the branches, while the sky slowly lost its color and became an expanse that looked like the spread of glowing water.

    You'd let the whole world perish rather than soil that immaculate self of yours with a single spot of which you'd have to be ashamed.


    It meant nothing to him any longer, only a faint tinge of sadness--and somewhere within him, a drop of pain moving briefly and vanishing, like a raindrop on the glass of a window, its course in the shape of a question mark.

    She fell asleep, lying there, her hand clasping his. Her last awareness, before she surrendered the responsibility of consciousness, was the sense of an enormous void, the void of a city and of a continent, where she would never be able to find the man whom she had no right to seek.

    Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of other men. Blood, whips and guns--or dollars. Take your choice--there is no other.

    Your emotional capacity is an empty motor, and your values are the fuel with which your mind fills it. If you choose a mix of contradictions, it will clog your motor, corrode your transmission and wreck you on your first attempt to move with a machine which you, the driver, have corrupted.

    He stepped to the window and pointed to the skyscrapers of the city. He said that we had to extinguish the lights of the world, and when we would see the lights of New York go out, we would know that our job was done.


    She started off, walking fast, as if the speed of her steps could give form to the things she felt.


    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.



    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.



    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.



    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.


    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.



    More Ayn Rand Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Man - Mind - Life - Money & Wealth - Morality - World - Reality - Good & Evil - Love - Value - Honesty & Integrity - Success - Thought & Thinking - Sense & Perception - Vice & Virtue - Purposes - Happiness - Efforts - Reasoning - View All Ayn Rand Quotations

    More Ayn Rand Quotations (By Book Titles)


    - Anthem
    - Atlas Shrugged
    - The Fountainhead

    Related Authors


    Dale Carnegie - Robert Louis Stevenson - Milan Kundera - Margaret J. Wheatley - John Grisham - Henry Drummond - Ella Wheeler Wilcox - Charles Caleb Colton - Bill Bryson - Bernardo Bertolucci


Page 1 of 2 1 2

Authors (by First Name)

A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - I - J - K - L - M
N - O - P - Q - R - S - T - U - V - W - X - Y - Z

Other Inspiring Sections