"For the "We" must never be spoken, save by one's choice and as a second thought. This word must never be placed first within a man's soul, else it becomes a monster, the root of all evils on earth, the root of man's torture by men, and an unspeakable lie."

"A quest for self-respect is proof of its lack."

"Never place your punch at the beginning of a column nor at the end. Sneak it in where it's least expected. Fill a whole column with drivel, just to get in that one important line."

"Do you know what she did today?" He leaned confidentially across the table, pointing at the dishes in the sink. "She went to the market and left all the breakfast dishes there and said she'd do them later. I know what she wanted. She expected me to do them. Well, I'll fool her. I'll leave them just where they are."

"When I die, I hope to go to Heaven, whatever the Hell that is."

"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. 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."

"Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life. Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself."

"Anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today."

"To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That's what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul - would you understand why that's much harder?"

"Sweep aside those hatred-eaten mystics, who pose as friends of humanity and preach that the highest virtue man can practice is to hold his own life as of no value. Do they tell you that the purpose of morality is to curb man's instinct of self-preservation? It is for the purpose of self-preservation that man needs a code of morality. The only man who desires to be moral is the man who desires to live."

"You're so beautiful, Dominique. Its such a lovely accident on God's part that there's one person who matches inside and out."

"I have yet to see a genius or a hero who, if stuck with a burning match, would feel less pain than his undistinguished average brother."

"Why had we let it go? Why had we both been condemned...to an exile among dreary strangers who had made us give up all desire for rest, for friendship, for the sound of human voices? Could I now reclaim a single hour spent talking to my brother, Philip, and give it to Ken Daggart? Who made it our duty to accept, as the only reward for our work, the gray torture of pretending love for those who roused nothing but contempt?"

"Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think."

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

"The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles."

"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."

"Man has the power to act as his own destroyer-and that is the way he has acted through most of his history."

"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."

"It is my eyes which see, and the sight of my eyes grants beauty to the earth. It is my ears which hear, and the hearing of my ears gives its song to the world. It is my mind which thinks, and the judgement of my mind is the only searchlight that can find the truth. It is my will which chooses, and the choice of my will is the only edict I must respect."

"He's not really struggling even for material wealth, but for the second-hander's delusion-prestige. A stamp of approval, not his own. He can find no joy in the struggle and no joy when he has succeeded."

"Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification. A contradiction cannot exist. No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge. To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one's thinking, to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one's mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality."

"Men have been taught that the ego is the synonym of evil, and selflessness the ideal of virtue. But the creator is the egotist in the absolute sense, and the selfless man is the one who does not think, feel, judge or act. These are functions of the self."

"The source of work? Man's mind...man's reasoning mind."

"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."

"I love you so much that nothing can matter to me - not even you...Only my love- not your answer. Not even your indifference."

"Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values."

"To irrational principles, one cannot be loyal. Ideas that are not derived from reality cannot be consistently practiced in reality.-as quoted by Leonard Peikoff in "Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand."

"Government 'help' to business is just as disastrous as government persecution... the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off."

"What is kinder-to believe the best of people and burden them with a nobility beyond their endurance-or to see them as they are, and accept it because it makes them comfortable?"

"To demand 'sense' is the hallmark of nonsense. Nature does not make sense. Nothing makes sense."

"Their eyes were dark and hard and glowing, with no fear in them, no kindness and no guilt."

"It was a hymn with the force of a march, a march with the majesty of a hymn. It was the song of soldiers bearing sacred banners and of priests carrying swords. It was an anthem to the sanctity of strength."

"The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities."

"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."

"Who is John Galt?"

"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."

"The unrecognized genius-that's an old story. Have you ever thought of a much worse one-the genius recognized too well? ... That a great many men are poor fools who can't see the best-that's nothing. One can't get angry at that. But do you understand about the men who see it and don't want it?"

"By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man-every man-is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose."

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

"Men have been taught that it is a virtue to agree with others. But the creator is the man who disagrees. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to swim with the current. But the creator is the man who goes against the current. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to stand together. But the creator is the man who stands alone."

"Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice. He has no automatic knowledge of what is good for him or evil, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires...Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, which nature will not force him to perform."

"The capacity for unclouded enjoyment, she thought, does not belong to irresponsible fools; an inviolate peace of spirit is not the achievement of a drifter; to be able to laugh like that is the end result of the most profound, most solemn thinking."

"Man's mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action...To remain alive, he must think."

"My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute."

"It seemed natural; natural to the moment's peculiar reality that was sharply clear, but cut off from everything, immediate, but disconnected, like a bright island in a wall of fog, the heightened, unquestioning reality one feels when one is drunk."