"The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me."
— Ayn Rand

"Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swaps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. 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 world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it's yours."
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others."
— Ayn Rand

"Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. But, in fact, a person's sexual choice is the result and sum of their fundamental convictions. Tell me what a person finds sexually attractive and I will tell you their entire philosophy of life. Show me the person they sleep with and I will tell you their valuation of themselves. No matter what corruption they're taught about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which they cannot perform for any motive but their own enjoyment - just try to think of performing it in a spirit of selfless charity! - an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in self-exultation, only on the confidence of being desired and being worthy of desire. It is an act that forces them to stand naked in spirit, as well as in body, and accept their real ego as their standard of value. They will always be attracted to the person who reflects their deepest vision of themselves, the person whose surrender permits them to experience - or to fake - a sense of self-esteem .. Love is our response to our highest values - and can be nothing else."
— Ayn Rand

"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."
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders - What would you tell him?"

"I…don't know. What…could he do? What would you tell him?"

"To shrug."
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see."
— Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)

"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…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."
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"Why do they always teach us that it's easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It's the hardest thing in the world--to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want."
— Ayn Rand

"If you don't know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn."
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"To say "I love you" one must know first how to say the "I"."
— Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)

"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."
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities."
— Ayn Rand

"Who is John Galt?"
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"I could die for you. But I couldn't, and wouldn't, live for you."
— Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)

"A government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims."
— Ayn Rand

"The truth is not for all men but only for those who seek it."
— Ayn Rand

"Devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality; there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking."
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"Have you felt it too? Have you seen how your best friends love everything about you- except the things that count? And your most important is nothing to them; nothing, not even a sound they can recognize."
— Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)

"Fight for the value of your person. Fight for the virtue of your pride. Fight for the essence of that which is man: for his sovereign rational mind. Fight with the radiant certainty and the absolute rectitude that yours is the Morality of Life and that yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth...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."
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live."
— Ayn Rand

"The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone."
— Ayn Rand (The Virtue of Selfishness)

"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."
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"I think, therefore I'll think."
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter."
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"Never think of pain or danger or enemies a moment longer than is necessary to fight them."
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"Freedom (n.): To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing."
— Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)

"Don't fool yourself, my dear. You're much worse than a bitch. You're a saint. Which shows why saints are dangerous and undesirable."
— Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)

"Learn to value yourself, which means: fight for your happiness."
— Ayn Rand

"But you see," said Roark quietly, "I have, let’s say, sixty years to live. Most of that time will be spent working. I’ve chosen the work I want to do. If I find no joy in it, then I’m only condemning myself to sixty years of torture. And I can find the joy only if I do my work in the best way possible to me. But the best is a matter of standards—and I set my own standards. I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition. I may, perhaps, stand at the beginning of one."
— Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)

"I worship individuals for their highest possibilities as individuals and I loathe humanity for its failure to live up to these possibilities."
— Ayn Rand

"Is it advisable to spread out all the conveniences of culture before people to whom a few steps up a stair to a library is a sufficient deterrent from reading?"
— Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)

"If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing."
— Ayn Rand

"Learn to value yourself, which means: to fight for your happiness. I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction."
— Ayn Rand

"Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it."
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"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, contempt, and general indifference, 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’re incapable of anything less."
— Ayn Rand

"I never found beauty in longing for the impossible and never found the possible to be beyond my reach."
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit."
— Ayn Rand

"The word "We" is as lime poured over men, which sets and hardens to stone, and crushes all beneath it, and that which is white and that which is black are lost equally in the grey of it. It is the word by which the depraved steal the virtue of the good, by which the weak steal the might of the strong, by which the fools steal the wisdom of the sages.

What is my joy if all hands, even the unclean, can reach into it? What is my wisdom, if even the fools can dictate to me? What is my freedom, if all creatures, even the botched and impotent, are my masters? What is my life, if I am but to bow, to agree and to obey?

But I am done with this creed of corruption.

I am done with the monster of "We," the word of serfdom, of plunder, of misery, falsehood and shame.

And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride.

This god, this one word:

"I."
— Ayn Rand (Anthem)

"I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. Particularly when one can't see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window - no, I don't feel how small I am - but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body."
— Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)

"Haven't I? - he thought. Haven't I thought of it since the first time I saw you? Haven't I thought of nothing else for two years? ...He sat motionless, looking at her. He heard the words he had never allowed himself to form, the words he had felt, known, yet had not faced, had hoped to destroy by never letting them be said within his own mind. Now it was as sudden and shocking as if he were saying it to her ...Since the first time I saw you ...Nothing but your body, that mouth of yours, and the way your eyes would look at me, if ...Through every sentence I ever said to you, through every conference you thought so safe, through the importance of all the issues we discussed ...You trusted me, didn't you? To recognize your greatness? To think of you as you deserved - as if you were a man? ...Don't you suppose I know how much I've betrayed? The only bright encounter of my life - the only person I respected - the best business man I know - my ally - my partner in a desperate battle ...The lowest of all desires - as my answer to the highest I've met ...Do you know what I am? I thought of it, because it should have been unthinkable. For that degrading need, which would never touch you, I have never wanted anyone but you ...I hadn't known what it was like, to want it, until I saw you for the first time. I had thought : Not I, I couldn't be broken by it ...Since then ...For two years ...With not a moments respite ...Do you know what it's like, to want it? Would you wish to hear what I thought when I looked at you ...When I lay awake at night ...When I hear your voice over a telephone wire ...When I worked, but could not drive it away? ...To bring you down to things you cant conceive - and to know that it's I who have done it. To reduce you to a body, to teach you an animal's pleasure, to see you need it, to see you asking me for it, to see your wonderful spirit dependent on the upon the obscenity of your need. To watch you as you are, as you face the world with your clean, proud strength - then to see you, in my bed, submitting to any infamous whim I may devise, to any act which I'll preform for the sole purpose of watching your dishonor and to which you'll submit for the sake of an unspeakable sensation ...I want you - and may I be damned for it!

- Henry Rearden"
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values."
— Ayn Rand

"Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force. man had no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle. He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons,and to make weapons - a process of thought. From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and we have comes from a single attribute of man -the function of his reasoning mind."
— Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)

"People create their own questions because they are afraid to look straight. All you have to do is look straight and see the road, and when you see it, don't sit looking at it - walk."
— Ayn Rand

"There’s nothing as significant as a human face. Nor as eloquent. We can never really know another person, except by our first glance at him. Because, in that glance, we know everything. Even thought we’re not always wise enough to unravel the knowledge."
— Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)

"Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artists metaphysical value judgments."
— Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)

"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 (Atlas Shrugged)

"If one's actions are honest, one does not need the predated confidence of others."
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"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."
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"I regret nothing. There have been things I missed, but I ask no questions, because I have loved it, such as it has been, even the moments of emptiness, even the unanswered-and that I loved it, that is the unanswered in my life."
— Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)