"Through all the ages the mind has been regarded as evil, and every form of insult: from heretic to materialist to exploiter-every form of iniquity: from exile to disfranchisement to expropriation-every form of torture: from sneers to rack to firing squad-have been brought down upon those who assumed the responsibility of looking at the world through the eyes of a living consciousness and performing the crucial act of a rational connection. Yet only to the extent to which-in chains, in dungeons, in hidden corners, in the cells of philosophers, in the shops of traders-some men continued to think, only to that extent was humanity able to survive."

"People, he thought, were as hungry for a sight of joy as he had always been-for a moment's relief from that gray load of suffering which seemed so inexplicable and unnecessary. He had never been able to understand why men should be unhappy."

"The man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably, the man who respects it has earned it."

"I do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and I do not live in chronic dread of disaster. It is no happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that I regard as the abnormal exception in Human Life."

"Let us throw away our candles and our torches. Let us flood the cities with light. Let us bring a new light to men!"

"That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call 'free will' is your mind's freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character."

"Great men can't be ruled... The great is the rare, the difficult, the exceptional."

"She had been proved right so eloquently, she had thought, that comments were unnecessary."

"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."

"Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death."

"SeA±or d.'Anconia, what do you think is going to happen to the world? "Just exactly what it deserves. "Oh, how cruel! "Don't you believe in the operation of the moral law, madame? Francisco asked gravely. "I do."

"Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter."

"The faces stood out, separate, lonely, no two alike. Behind each, there were the years of a life lived or half over, effort, hope and an attempt, honest or dishonest, but an attempt. It had left on all a single mark in common: on lips smiling with malice, on lips loose with renunciation, on lips tight with uncertain dignity-on all-the mark of suffering."

"God... a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive."

"She survived it. She was able to survive it, because she did not believe in suffering. She faced with astonished indignation the ugly fact of feeling pain, and refused to let it matter. Suffering was a senseless accident, it was not part of life as she saw it."

"Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artists metaphysical value judgments."

"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."

"He saw the article...which was not an expression of ideas, but a bucket of slime emptied in public-an article that did not contain a single fact, not even an invented one, but poured a stream of sneers and adjectives in which nothing was clear except the filthy malice of denouncing without considering proof necessary."

"There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil."

"I win by means of nothing but logic and I surrender to nothing but logic. I do not surrender my reason or deal with men who surrender theirs."

"Those who grant sympathy to guilt, grant none to innocence."

"What would happen to the world without those who do, think, work, produce? Those are the egotists. You don't think through another's brain and you don't work through another's hands. When you suspend your faculty of independent judgment, you suspend consciousness. To stop consciousness is to stop life."

"Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind."

"People are not embracing collectivism because they have accepted bad economics. They are accepting bad economics because they have embraced collectivism."

"Sacrifice is the surrender of that which you value in favor of which you don't."

"Man's life is the standard of morality, but your own life is its purpose . If existence on earth is your goal, you must choose your actions and values by the standard of that which is proper to man-for the purpose of preserving, fulfilling and enjoying the irreplaceable value which is your life."

"Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life."

"Throughout his life, whenever he became convinced that a course of action was right, the desire to follow it had come automatically."

"She saw the faces streaming past her, the faces made alike by fear-fear as a common denominator, fear of themselves, fear of all and of one another, fear making them ready to pounce upon whatever was held sacred by any single one they met...She had kept herself clean and free in a single passion-to touch nothing. She had liked facing them in the streets, she had liked the impotence of their hatred, because she offered them nothing to be hurt."

"An artist reveals his naked soul in his work - and so, gentle reader, do you when you respond to it."

"The worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt."

"Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it's yours."

"The audience looked at him. They felt he had no chance. They could drop the nameless resentment, the sense of insecurity which he aroused in most people. And so, for the first time, they could see him as he was: a man totally innocent of fear."

"To achieve, you need thought. You have to know what you are doing and that's real power."

"Serenity comes from the ability to say "Yes, to existence. Courage comes from the ability to say "No, to the wrong choices made by others."

"Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice - and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man - by choice; he has to hold his life as a value - by choice; he has to learn to sustain it - by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues - by choice.A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality."

"Integrity is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your consciousness, just as honesty is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake existence."

"When the name of Gail Wynand became a threat in the publishing world, a group of newspaper owners took him aside-at a city charity affair which all had to attend-and reproached him for what they called hid debasement of the public taste."It is not my function" said Wynand, "to help people preserve a self-respect they haven't got. You give them what they profess to like in public, I give them what they really like. Honesty is the best policy, gentlemen, though not quite in the sense you were taught to belive"."

"I often think that he's the only one of us who's achieved immortality. I don't mean in the sense of fame and I don't mean he won't die someday. But he's living it. I think he is what the conception really means. You know how people long to be eternal. But they die with everyday that passes. . . They change, they deny, they contradict- and they call it growth. At the end there is nothing left, nothing unreveresed or unbetrayed; as if there had never been an entity, only a succession of adjectives fading in and out of an unformed mass. How do they expect a permanence which they never held for a single moment? But Howard- one can imagine him living forever."

"It's not that I don't suffer, it's that I know the unimportance of suffering, I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one's soul and as a permanent scar across one's view of existence."

"The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap."

"Man's life, as required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless brute, of a looting thug or a mooching mystic, but the life of a thinking being-not life by means of force or fraud, but life by means of achievement-not survival at any price, since there's only one price that pays for man's survival: reason."

"I take no pride in hopeless longing; I wouldn't hold a stillborn aspiration. I'd want to have it, to make it, to live it."

"Happiness is the successful state of life, pain is an agent of death. Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values. A morality that dares to tell you to find happiness in the renunciation of your happiness-to value the failure of your values-is an insolent negation of morality."

"They say that it's hard for men to agree. You'd be surprised how easy it is-when both parties hold as their moral absolute that neither exists for the sake of the other and that reason is their only means of trade."

"The age of the skyscraper is gone. This is the age of the housing project. Which is always a prelude to the age of the cave."

"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."

"Happiness is self-contained and self-sufficient. Happy men have no time and no use for you. Happy men are free men."

"Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes."

"Well, I always know what I want. And when you know what you want-you go toward it. Sometimes you go very fast, and sometimes only an inch a year. Perhaps you feel happier when you go fast. I don't know. I've forgotten the difference long ago, because it really doesn't matter, so long as you move."