Ayn Rand - Atlas Shrugged (1957)

84 Sourced Quotes

View all Ayn Rand Quotes
What is man? He's just a collection of chemicals with delusions of grandeur.
This line was said by the character Dr. Pritchett

Ayn Rand
If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans — I would choose — because it contains all the others—the fact that they were the people who created the phrase "to make money." No other language or nation had ever used these words before.... Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created.

Ayn Rand
It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money...

Ayn Rand
Do not help your jailers to pretend that their jail is your natural state of existence.

Ayn Rand
The symbol of all relationships among such men, the moral symbol of respect for human beings, is the trader. We, who live by values, not by loot, are traders, both in matter and in spirit. A trader is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved.

Ayn Rand
Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality. But existence exists; reality is not to be wiped out, it will merely wipe out the wiper

Ayn Rand
There's only one passion in most artists more violent than their desire for admiration: their fear of identifying the nature of such admiration as they do receive.

Ayn Rand
No value is higher than self-esteem, but you've invested it in counterfeit securities-and now your morality has caught you in a trap where you are forced to protect your self-esteem by fighting for the creed of self-destruction. The grim joke is on you: that need of self-esteem, which you're unable to explain or to define, belongs to my morality, not yours; it's the objective token of my code, it is my proof within your own soul.

Ayn Rand
You're not sorry. You could've been here if you made the effort. But when did you ever make an effort for anybody but yourself? You're not interested in any of us or in anything we do. You think if you pay the bills, that's enough, don't you? Money! That's all you know. And all you give us is money. Have you even given us any time?

Ayn Rand
For centuries, the mystics of spirit had existed by running a protection racket - by making life on earth unbearable, then charging you for consolation and relief, by forbidding all the virtues that make existence possible, then riding on the shoulders of your guilt, by declaring production and joy to be sins, then collecting blackmail from the sinners.

Ayn Rand
People don't want to think. And the deeper they get into trouble, the less they want to think. But by some sort of instinct, they feel that they ought to and it makes them feel guilty. So they'll bless and follow anyone who gives them a justification for not thinking. Anyone who makes a virtue - a highly intellectual virtue - out of what they know to be their sin, their weakness and their guilt.

Ayn Rand
Integrity is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your consciousness, just as honesty is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake existence.

Ayn Rand
He liked to observe emotions; they were like red lanterns strung along the dark unknown of another's personality, marking vulnerable points.

Ayn Rand
The doctrine that 'human rights' are superior to 'property rights' simply means that some human beings have the right to make property out of others.

Ayn Rand
For the first time since her return, she felt pain, a violent pain, but it made her feel alive, because it was worth feeling.

Ayn Rand
Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it's yours.

Ayn Rand
It is a policeman's duty to retrieve stolen property and return it to its owners. But when robbery becomes the purpose of the law, and the policeman's duty becomes, not protection, but the plunder of property - then it is an outlaw who has to become a policeman.

Ayn Rand
She did not know the nature of her loneliness. The only words that named it were: This is not the world I expected.

Ayn Rand
The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren

Ayn Rand
It's not that I don't suffer, it's that I know the unimportance of suffering. I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one's soul and as a permanent scar across one's view of existence.

Ayn Rand
There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. When there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.

Ayn Rand
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.

Ayn Rand
Litigants obey the verdict of a tribunal solely on the premise that there is an objective rule of conduct, which they both accept.

Ayn Rand
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.

Ayn Rand
Now you see, Dr. Stadler, you're speaking as if this book were addressing to a thinking audience. If it were, one would have to be concerned with such matters as accuracy, validity, logic and the prestige of science. But it isn't. It's addressed to the public.

Ayn Rand
There are no evil thoughts except one: the refusal to think.

Ayn Rand
The only man never to be redeemed is the man without passion.

Ayn Rand
In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.

Ayn Rand
Whenever anyone accuses some person of being 'unfeeling,' he means that that person is just.

Ayn Rand
To demand 'sense' is the hallmark of nonsense. Nature does not make sense. Nothing makes sense.

Ayn Rand