Ayn Rand (1905 – 1982)
Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter.
The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive- a definition that invalidates man's consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence. Man's mind, say the mystics of spirit, must be subordinated to the will of God. Man's standard of value, say the mystics of spirit, is the pleasure of God, whose standards are beyond man's power of comprehension and must be accepted on faith. The purpose of man's life is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question.
Existence exists—and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists.
Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others.
Every loneliness is a pinnacle.
"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"
You know how people long to be eternal. But they die with every day that passes. When you meet them, they’re not what you met last. In any given hour, they kill some part of themselves. They change, they deny, they contradict--and they call it growth. At the end there’s nothing left, nothing unreversed or unbetrayed; as if there had never been an entity, only a succession of adjectives fading in and out on an unformed mass.
A gun is not an argument.
The worst evil that you can do, psychologically, is to laugh at yourself. That means spitting in your own face.
Love is our response to our highest values.
I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.
Only by accepting total compulsion can we achieve total freedom. [Spoken by Ellsworth Toohey, the main antagonist of the book.]
Even if smog were a risk to human life, we must remember that life in nature, without technology, is wholesale death.
The highest thing in a man is not his god. It's that in him which knows the reverence due a god. You are my highest reverence.
...observe that in all the propaganda of the ecologists—amidst all their appeals to nature and pleas for 'harmony with nature'—there is no discussion of man's needs and the requirements of his survival. Man is treated as if he were an unnatural phenomenon. Man cannot survive in the kind of state of nature that the ecologists envision—i.e., on the level of sea urchins or polar bears...
Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason.
Through centuries of scourges and disasters, brought about by your code of morality, you have cried that your code had been broken, that the scourges were punishment for breaking it, that men were too weak and too selfish to spill all the blood it required. You damned men, you damned existence, you damned this earth, but never dared to question your code. Your victims took the blame and struggled on, with your curses as reward for their martyrdom - while you went on crying that your code was noble, but human nature was not good enough to practice it. And no one rose to ask the question: Good? - by what standard?
"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."
There’s so much nonsense about human inconstancy and the transience of all emotions. I've always thought that a feeling which changes never existed in the first place. - Gail Wynand
The shortest distance between two points is not a straight line- it’s a middleman. And the more middlemen, the shorter. Such is the psychology of a pretzel.
There is nothing to take a man's freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers.