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

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.

Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy--a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but of using your mind's fullest power, not the joy of faking reality, but of achieving values that are real, not the joy of a drunkard, but of a producer.

If you don't know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn.

People, he thought, were as hungry for a sight of joy as he had always been--for a moment's relief from that gray load of suffering which seemed so inexplicable and unnecessary. He had never been able to understand why men should be unhappy.

There are no evil thoughts except one; the refusal to think.

You know, I think that only if one feels immensely important can one feel truly light.

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.

In this world, either you're virtuous or you enjoy yourself. Not both, lady, not both.

Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.

There is no necessity for pain-why, then, is the worst pain reserved for those who will not accept its necessity?

You still love me - even if there's one expression of it that you will always feel and want, but will not give me no longer. I'm still what I was, and you'll always see it, and you'll always grant me the same response, even if there's a greater one that you grant another man. No matter what you feel for him, it will not change what you feel for me, and it won't treason to either, because it comes from the same root, it's the same payment in answer to the same values.

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

It is not death that we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to live.

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

There is no such thing as a lousy job - only lousy men who don't care to do 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.

He never felt lonliness except when he was happy.

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.