Ayn Rand - Atlas Shrugged (1957)

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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
She's a writer. The kind of writer who wouldn't be published outside. She believes that when one deals with words, one deals with the mind.

Ayn Rand
When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of other men. Blood, whips and guns—or dollars. Take your choice—there is no other.

Ayn Rand
Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice... Man has to be a man-by choice; he has to hold his life as a value-by choice; he has to learn to sustain it-by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues by choice. A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.

Ayn Rand
Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires.

Ayn Rand
The man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.

Ayn Rand
I refuse to accept as guilt the fact of my own existence.

Ayn Rand
It is not advisable, James, to venture unsolicited opinions. You should spare yourself the embarrassing discovery of their exact value to your listener.

Ayn Rand
Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason.

Ayn Rand
Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where the gun begins.

Ayn Rand
Why is it immoral for you to desire, but moral for others to do so? Why is it immoral to produce a value and keep it, but moral to give it away? And if it is not moral for you to keep a value, why is it moral for others to accept it? If you are selfless and virtuous when you give it, are they not selfish and vicious when they take it?

Ayn Rand
If you don't know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn.

Ayn Rand
There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.

Ayn Rand
Did I feel a physical desire for him? I did. Was I moved by a passion of my body? I was. Have I experienced the most violent form of sensual pleasure? I have.

Ayn Rand
I hold that such a question can never arise except in a society of cannibals.

Ayn Rand
The code of competence is the only system of morality that's on a gold standard.

Ayn Rand
Dagny, we can never lose the things we live for. We may have to change their form at times, if we've made an error, but the purpose remains the same and the forms are ours to make.

Ayn Rand
Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.

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
She was incapable of love for any object not of her own choice and she resented anyone's demand for it.

Ayn Rand
He, too, stood looking at her for a moment—and it seemed to her that it was not a look of greeting after an absence, but the look of someone who had thought of her every day of that year. She could not be certain, it was only an instant, so brief that just as she caught it, he was turning...

Ayn Rand
I'm working to improve my methods, and every hour I save is an hour added to my life.

Ayn Rand
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
The entire history of science is a progression of exploded fallacies, not of achievements.

Ayn Rand
The special quality one feels for the dead, he thought, is that no action is possible any longer.

Ayn Rand
Sacrifice is the surrender of that which you value in favor of which you don't.

Ayn Rand
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
There's nothing of any importance in life-except how well you do your work.

Ayn Rand