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"Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own - they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal - for a mind to respect and an achievement to admire...They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear."
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Exlpore more Exploration quotes
"There were mountains; there were valleys; there were streams. She climbed the mountains; roamed the valleys; sat on the banks of streams.....when, from the mountain-top, she beheld, far off, across the Sea of Marmara the plains of Greece, and made out (her eyes were admirable) the Acropolis with a white streak or two which must, she thought, be the Parthenon, her soul expanded with her eyeballs, and she prayed she might share the majesty of the hills, know the serenity of the plains, etc. etc., as all such believers do."
"If you travel in space for three years and come back, four hundred years will have passed on Earth. I am only an armchair astronomer, but I have the odd sense that I have returned from a journey to a world where nothing quite makes sense."
"Just a child is free to wander in one's father's garden, discovering little or big things; it is left to the seeker to grow unto the Nature of the Absolute."
"Even if the aliens are short, dour, and sexually obsessed-if they're here, I want to know about them."
"Treading the soil of the moon, palpating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, feeling in the pit of one's stomach the separation from terra... these form the most romantic sensation an explorer has ever known..."
"The greatest danger to man in space was man himself."
"We'll choose knowledge no matter what, we'll maim ourselves in the process, we'll stick our hands into the flames for it if necessary. Curiosity is not our only motive; love or grief or despair or hatred is what drives us on. We'll spy relentlessly on the dead; we'll open their letters, we'll read their journals, we'll go through their trash, hoping for a hint, a final word, an explanation, from those who have deserted us-who've left us holding the bag, which is often a good deal emptier than we'd supposed."
"Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward, ever outward. Eventually it flung them out into space, into the colorless, tasteless, weightless sea of outwardness without end. It flung them like stones."
"I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another til I drop."
"But ironically the believers have done worse in exploring the earth than sons of men who are not even believers have done."
Explore more quotes by Ayn Rand
"The power of the sky can be made to do men's bidding. There are no limits to its secrets and its might, and it can be made to grant us anything if we but choose to ask."
"Were she lying crushed under the ruins of a building, were she torn by the bomb of an air raid, so long as she was still in existence she would know that action is man's foremost obligation, regardless of anything he feels."
"She wanted to tell him of the years she had spent looking for men such as he to work with; she wanted to tell him that his enemies were hers, that she was fighting the same battle..."
"For the coming of that day shall I fight, I and my sons and my chosen friends. For the freedom of Man. For his rights. For his life. For his honor."
"Whatever the degree of your knowledge, these two-existence and consciousness-are axioms you cannot escape, these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action you undertake, in any part of your knowledge and in its sum, from the first ray of light you perceive at the start of your life to the widest erudition you might acquire at its end."
"He needed the people and the clamour around him. There was no questions and no doubts when he stood on a platform over a sea of faces; the air was heavy, compact, saturated with a single solvent-admiration; there was no room for anything else. He was great; great as the number of people who told him so. He was right; right as the number of people who believed it. He looked at the faces, at the eyes, he saw himself born in them, he saw himself granted the gift of life. That was Peter Keating, that, the reflection in those staring pupils, and his body was only it's reflection."
"If this is vise I want no virtue....I know what happiness is possible to me on earth. And my happiness needs no higher aim to vindicate it. My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose. Neither am I the means to any end others may wish to accomplish. I am not a tool for their use. I am not a servant of their needs. I am not a bandage for their wounds. I am not a sacrifice on their altars....But what is freedom? Freedom from what? 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. That is freedom. That and nothing else."
"To the extent to which a man is rational, life is the premise directing his actions. To the extent to which he is irrational, the premise directing his actions is death."
"If the rest of them can survive only by destroying us, then why should we wish them to survive? . . . Nothing can make it moral to destroy the best. One can't be punished for being good. One can't be penalized for ability."
"He wanted nothing, for the time being, except to understand .... Without advice, assistance or plan, he began reading an incongruous assortment of books; he would find some passage which he could not understand in one book, and he would get another on that subject .... There was no order in his reading; but there was order in what remained of it in his mind."
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