Ayn Rand

“Learn to value yourself, which means: fight for your happiness.”

“The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.”

“I can accept anything, except what seems to be the easiest for most people: the half-way, the almost, the just-about, the in-between.”

“Aristotle may be regarded as the cultural barometer of Western history. Whenever his influence dominated the scene, it paved the way for one of history's brilliant eras; whenever it fell, so did mankind.”

“No action could be lower or more futile than for one person to throw upon another the burden of his abdication of choice.”

“Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.”

“She found a dark satisfaction in pain—because that pain came from him.”

“...they want us to pretend that we see the world as they pretend they see it. They need some sort of sanction from us.”

“Who is John Galt?”

“In art, and in literature, the end and the means, or the subject and the style, must be worthy of each other.That which is not worth contemplating in life, is not worth re-creating in art.”

“She sat listening to the music. It was a symphony of triumph. The notes flowed up, they spoke of rising and they were the rising itself, they were the essence and the form of upward motion, they seemed to embody every human act and thought that had ascent as its motive. It was a sunburst of sound, breaking out of hiding and spreading open. It had the freedom of release and the tension of purpose. It swept space clean, and left nothing but the joy of an unobstructed effort. Only a faint echo within the sounds spoke of that from which the music had escaped, but spoke in laughing astonishment at the discovery that there was no ugliness or pain, and there never had to be. It was the song of an immense deliverance.”

“A desire to choose the hardest might be a confession of weakness in itself.”

“We are all brothers under the skin - and I, for one, would be willing to skin humanity to prove it.”

“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.”

“Now look at me! Take a good look! I was born and I knew I was alive and I knew what I wanted. What do you think is alive in me? Why do you think I'm alive? Because I have a stomach and eat and digest the food? Because I breathe and work and produce more food to digest? Or because I know what I want, and that something which knows how to want—isn't that life itself? And who—in this damned universe—who can tell me why I should live for anything but for that which I want?”

“At a time like this, we can't afford the luxury of thinking!”

“A desire presupposes the possibility of action to achieve it; action presupposes a goal which is worth achieving.”

“To say ‘I love you’ one must first know how to say the ‘I.’ The meaning of the ‘I’ is an independent, self-sufficient entity that does not exist for the sake of any other person. A person who exists only for the sake of his loved one is not an independent entity, but a spiritual parasite. The love of a parasite is worth nothing.”

“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 though we’re not always wise enough to unravel the knowledge.”

“The truth is not for all men, but only for those who seek it.”