Ayn Rand Quotes

“Can’t you ever do things without reason, just like everybody else?”

“But a desire to choose the hardest might be a confession of weakness in itself.”

“Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.”

“If I found a job, a project, an idea or a person I wanted—I’d have to depend on the whole world. Everything has strings leading to everything else. We’re all so tied together.”

“I can’t live a life torn between that which exists—and you.”

“But what can you do when you have to deal with people?”

“This is the time to merge his self in a great current, in the rising tide which is approaching to sweep us all, willing or unwilling, into the future.”

“You never wanted me to be real. You never wanted anyone to be. But you didn’t want to show it.”

“Every form of happiness is private.”

“It was a pedestal from which a god had been torn, and in his place there stood, not Satan with a sword, but a corner lout sipping a bottle of Coca-Cola.”

“I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”

“This was reality, she thought, this sense of clear outlines, of purpose, of lightness, of hope.”

“Catherine had said it, he was selfish; everybody was selfish; it was not a pretty thing, to be selfish, but he was not alone in it.”

“She had not noticed him take her hand; it seemed so natural and what she had wanted from the moment of seeing him”

“She thought, I’ve learned to bear anything except happiness. I must learn how to carry it.”

“Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.”

“It was the joy of admiration and of one’s own ability, growing together.”

“Compromise now, because you’ll have to later, anyway.”

“The senseless is the major factor in our lives.”

“Every building is like a person. Single and unrepeatable.”

“And what, incidentally, do you think integrity is? The ability not to pick a watch out of your neighbor’s pocket?”

“It was the greatest sensation of existence: not to trust, but to know.”

“And isn’t that the root of every despicable action? Not selfishness, but precisely the absence of self.”

“It’s the hardest thing in the world—to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage.”

“They were simply four people who liked being there together.”

“Don’t ever get angry at a man for stating the truth.”

“By the essence and nature of existence, contradictions cannot exist.”

“Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think.”

“There are no evil thoughts except one: the refusal to think.”

“No one’s happiness but my own is in my power to achieve or to destroy.”

“I wished to know the meaning of things. I am the meaning.”

“There was no pain in their eyes and no knowledge of the agony of their body. There was only joy in them, and pride, a pride holier than it is fit for human pride to be.”

“We are old now, yet we were young this morning, when we carried our glass box through the streets of the City to the Home of the Scholars.”

“I am. I think. I will.”

“But I still wonder how it was possible, in those graceless years of transition, long ago, that men did not see whither they were going, and went on, in blindness and cowardice, to their fate.”

“Many men in the Homes of the Scholars have had strange new ideas in the past . . . but when the majority of their brother Scholars voted against them, they abandoned their ideas, as all men must.”

“But here, in our tunnel, we feel it no longer. The air is pure under the ground. There is no odor of men. And these three hours give us strength for our hours above the ground.”

“But we loved the Science of Things. We wished to know. We wished to know about all the things which make the earth around us. We asked so many questions that the Teachers forbade it.”

“We sat still and we held our breath. For our face and our body were beautiful. Our face was not like the faces of our brothers, for we felt no pity when looking upon it. Our body was not like the bodies of our brothers, for our limbs were straight and thin and hard and strong. And we thought that we could trust this being who looked upon us from the stream, and that we had nothing to fear with this being.”

“But what is freedom? Freedom from what? There is nothing to take a man’s freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. That is freedom. That and nothing else.”

“We are one in all and all in one. There are no men but only the great WE, One, indivisible and forever.”

“We strive to be like all our brother men, for all men must be alike.”

“And we heard suddenly that we were laughing, laughing aloud, laughing as if there were no power left in us save laughter.”

“It is a sin to write this. It is a sin to think words no others think and to put them down upon a paper no others are to see. It is base and evil. It is as if we were speaking alone to no ears but our own. And we know well that there is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone.”

“No single one can possess greater wisdom than the many Scholars who are elected by all men for their wisdom. Yet we can. We do.”

“It is my mind which thinks, and the judgment of my mind is the only searchlight that can find the truth.”

“And my happiness needs no higher aim to vindicate it. My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose.”

“Dare not choose in your minds the work you would like to do when you leave the Home of the Students. You shall do that which the Council of Vocations shall prescribe for you.”

“There is fear hanging in the air of the sleeping halls, and in the air of the streets. Fear walks through the City, fear without name, without shape. All men feel it and none dare to speak.”

“We opened our eyes, lying on our stomach on the brick floor of a cell. We looked upon two hands lying far before us on the bricks, and we moved them, and we knew that they were our hands.”

“Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all.”

“The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it’s yours.”

“People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…”

“I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”

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

“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.”

“Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. ”

“The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on…There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.”