Ayn Rand - People Quotes

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There is nothing wrong in helping other people, if and when they are worthy of the help and you can afford to help them.

Ayn Rand
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

Ayn Rand
The people of Algiers marched through the streets of the city, in desperate protest against the new threat of civil war, shouting: 'We want peace! We want a government!' How are they to go about getting it? Through the years of civil war, they had been united, not by any political philosophy, but only by a racial issue. They were fighting, not for any program, but only against French rule. When they won their independence, they fell apart - into rival tribes and armed 'willayas' fighting one another

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
But why should you care what people will say? All you have to do is please yourself.

Ayn Rand
Reason can be fought with reason. How are you going to fight the unreasonable? The trouble with you, my dear, and with most people, is that you don't have sufficient respect for the senseless. The senseless is the major factor in our lives. You have no chance if it is your enemy.

Ayn Rand
When one observes the nightmare of the desperate efforts made by hundreds of thousands of people struggling to escape from the socialized countries of Europe, to escape over barbed-wire fences, under machine-gun fire—one can no longer believe that socialism, in any of its forms, is motivated by benevolence and by the desire to achieve men's welfare.

Ayn Rand
And what is the state but a servant and a convenience for a large number of people, just like the electric light and the plumbing system? And wouldn't it be preposterous to claim that men must exist for their plumbing, not the plumbing for the men.

Ayn Rand
It's such a waste to be subtle and vicious with people who don't even know that you're being subtle and vicious

Ayn Rand
I consider marriage a very important institution, but it is important when and if two people have found the person with whom they wish to spend the rest of their lives — a question of which no man or woman can be automatically certain.

Ayn Rand