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

"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)

"The man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it."
— 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

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

" It is not death that we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to live. "
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"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)

"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)

"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)

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

"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)

"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

"So, I love you because the entire universe conspired to help me find you."
— Paulo Coelho

"There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure."
— Paulo Coelho

"It's the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting."
— Paulo Coelho (The Alchemist)

"In real life, love has to be possible. Even if it is not returned right away, love can only survive when the hope exists that you will be able to win over the person you desire."
— Paulo Coelho (By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept)

"But love is always new. Regardless of whether we love once, twice, or a dozen times in our life, we always face a brand-new situation. Love can consign us to hell or to paradise, but it always takes us somewhere. We simply have to accept it, because it is what nourishes our existence. If we reject it, we die of hunger, because we lack the courage to stretch out a hand and pluck the fruit from the branches of the tree of life. We have to take love where we find it, even if that means hours, days, weeks of disappointment and sadness.

The moment we begin to seek love, love begins to seek us. And to save us."
— Paulo Coelho (By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept)

"You have to take risks, he said. We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen. Every day, God gives us the sun--and also one moment in which we have the ability to change everything that makes us unhappy. Every day, we try to pretend that we haven't perceived that moment, that it doesn't exist--that today is the same as yesterday and will be the same as tomorrow. But if people really pay attention to their everyday lives, they will discover that magic moment. It may arrive in the instant when we are doing something mundane, like putting our front-door key in the lock; it may lie hidden in the quiet that follows the lunch hour or in the thousand and one things that all seem the same to us. But that moment exists--a moment when all the power of the stars becomes a part of us and enables us to perform miracles."
— Paulo Coelho (By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept)

"But love is much like a dam; if you allow a tiny crack to form through which only a trickle of water can pass, that trickle will quickly bring down the whole structure and soon no one will be able to control the force of the current."
— Paulo Coelho (By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept)

"Love is a trap. When it appears, we see only its light, not its shadows."
— Paulo Coelho (By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept)

"Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened."
— Dr. Seuss

"We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."
— Elie Wiesel

"To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time."
— Elie Wiesel (Night)

"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

""Truly fine poetry must be read aloud. A good poem does not allow itself to be read in a low voice or silently. If we can read it silently, it is not a valid poem: a poem demands pronunciation. Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song.""
— Jorge Luis Borges

"...you can't measure time by days, the way you measure money by dollars and cents, because dollars are all the same while every day is different and maybe every hour as well."
— Borges, Jorge Luis

"What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature. I discovered that I am not disciplined out of virtue but as a reaction to my negligence, that I appear generous in order to conceal my meanness, that I pass myself off as prudent because I am evil-minded, that I am conciliatory in order not to succumb to my repressed rage, that I am punctual only to hide how little I care about other people’s time. I learned, in short, that love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac."
— Gabriel García Márquez (Memories of My Melancholy Whores)

"It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams."
— Gabriel García Márquez

""Always tell what you feel. Do what you think...""
— Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else's heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell."
— Gabriel García Márquez (Love in the Time of Cholera)

"Nobody deserves your tears, but whoever deserves them will not make you cry."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"If I knew that today would be the last time I’d see you, I would hug you tight and pray the Lord be the keeper of your soul. If I knew that this would be the last time you pass through this door, I’d embrace you, kiss you, and call you back for one more. If I knew that this would be the last time I would hear your voice, I’d take hold of each word to be able to hear it over and over again. If I knew this is the last time I see you, I’d tell you I love you, and would not just assume foolishly you know it already."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"Perhaps this is what the stories meant when they called somebody heartsick. Your heart and your stomach and your whole insides felt empty and hollow and aching."
— Gabriel García Márquez (Collected Stories)

"sex is the consolation you have when you can't have love"
— Gabriel García Márquez

"'You can't eat hope,' the woman said.
'You can't eat it, but it sustains you,' the colonel replied."
— Gabriel García Márquez (El Coronel No Tiene Quien Le Escriba)

"He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past."
— George Orwell (1984)

"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."
— George Orwell

"Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'."
— George Orwell

"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.

It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime."
— Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)

"There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing."
— Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)

"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free."
— Ronald Reagan

"Republicans believe every day is the Fourth of July, but the democrats believe every day is April 15."
— Ronald Reagan

"I know in my heart that man is good, that what is right will always eventually triumph, and there is purpose and worth to each and every life."
— Ronald Reagan

"We will always remember. We will always be proud. We will always be prepared, so we will always be free."
— Ronald Reagan

"How do you tell a Communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin."
— Ronald Reagan

"Recession is when your neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his."
— Ronald Reagan

"Our natural, inalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation from government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment."
— Ronald Reagan