top of page
Explore more quotes by Ayn Rand

"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."

"When men reject reason, they have no means left for dealing with one another - except brute, physical force."

"When one acts on pity against justice, it is the good whom one punishes for the sake of the evil; when one saves the guilty from suffering, it is the innocent whom one forces to suffer."

"But, you see, it's not what you do that matters really. It's only you.""Me what?""Just you here. Or you in the city. Or you somewhere in the world. I don't know. Just that."

"She had set out to break him, as if, unable to equal his value, she could surpass it by destroying it, as if the measure of his greatness would thus become the measure of hers, as if the vandal who smashed a statue were greater than the artist who had made it, as if the murderer who killed a child were greater than the mother who had given it birth."

"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."

"Men who reject the responsibility of thought and reason can only exist as parasites on the thinking of others."

"They scattered with no melody, no harmony, no rhythm to hold them. If music was emotion and emotion came from thought, then this was the scream of chaos, of the irrational, of the helpless, of man's self-abdication."

"Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration."
Exlpore more Identity quotes

"I was starting to see that what looks like garbage from one angle might be art from another. Maybe it did take a crisis to get to know yourself, maybe you needed to get whacked hard by life before you understood what you wanted out of it."

"You are the only one of your kind."

"We seldom look up to the person, we usually look up to their persona."

"If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that registered earthquakes ten thousand miles away."

"We have worth because we were created in the image and likeness of God."

"The simple truth is that the only real 'ex-gay' person is a dead gay person - and even then I am not too sure about the validity of that statement."
bottom of page