"Everything that isn't permitted by The Law is forbidden."

"The unrecognized genius-that's one old story. Have you ever thought of a much worse one-the genius recognized too well?"

"I'm not asking you to do your best. I'm asking you to do your job.""

"The things you were talking about. The lights and the flowers. Do they expect those things to make them romantic, not the other way around? "Darling, what do you mean? "There wasn't a person there who enjoyed it," she said, her voice lifeless, "or who thought or felt anything at all. They moved about, and they said the same dull things they say anywhere. I suppose they thought the lights would make it brilliant."Darling, you take everything too seriously. One is not supposed to be intellectual at a ball. One is simply supposed to be gay." How? By being stupid?"

"The practical implementation of friendship, affection and love consists of incorporating the welfare (the rational welfare) of the person involved into one's own hierarchy of values, then acting accordingly."

"A cardinal principle of good fiction [is]: the theme and the plot of a novel must be integrated-as thoroughly integrated as mind and body or thought and action in a rational view of man."

"The skyline of New York is a monument of a splendour that no pyramids or palaces will ever equal or approach."

"It was as if a volcano were cracking open, yet the people at the foot of the mountain ignored the sudden fissures, the black fumes, the boiling trickles, and went on believing that their only danger was to acknowledge the reality of these signs."

"This box is useless," said Alliance 6-7349.Should it be what they claim of it," said Harmony 9-2642, "then it would bring ruin to the Department of Candles."

"You love your work. God help you, you love it! And thats the curse. That's the brand on your forehead for all of them to see. You love it and they know it, and they know they have you. Do you ever look at the people in the street? Aren't you afraid of them? I am. They move past you and they wear hats and they carry bundles. But that's not the substance of them. The substance of them is hatred for any man who loves his work. That's the only kind they fear. I don't know why."

"The only pride of her workday was not that it had been lived, but that it had been survived. It was wrong, she thought, it was viciously wrong that one should ever be forced to say that about any hour of one's life."

"A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others."

"A gracefully effortless floating, flowing and flying are the essentials of the ballet's image of man."

"Do it first and feel about it afterwards.' - Dagny Taggart."

"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."

"I like cigarettes, Miss Taggart. I like to think of fire held in a man's hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what great things have come from such hours. When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind-and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression."

"A process of reason is a process of constant choice in answer to the question: True or False? - Right or Wrong?"

"The writer who develops a beautiful style, but has nothing to say, represents a kind of arrested esthetic development; he is like a pianist who acquires a brilliant technique by playing finger-exercises, but never gives a concert."

"People create their own questions because they are afraid to look straight. All you have to do is look straight and see the road, and when you see it, don't sit looking at it - walk."

"If that which we have found is the corruption of solitude, then what can men wish for save corruption? If this is the great evil of being alone, than what is good and what is evil?"

"It takes two to make a very great career: the man who is great, and the man-almost rarer-who is great enough to see greatness and say so."

"The pursuit of truth is not important. The pursuit of that truth is important which helps you in reaching your goal that is provided you have one."

"To say "I love you" one must first be able to say the "I.""

"Now you see, Dr. Stadler, you're speaking as if this book were addressing to a thinking audience. If it were, one would have to be concerned with such matters as accuracy, validity, logic and the prestige of science. But it isn't. It's addressed to the public."

"Fransisco, you're some kind of very high nobility, aren't you?" He answered, "Not yet. The reason my family has lasted for such a long time is that none of us has ever been permitted to think he is born a d'Anconia. We are expected to become one."

"What is morality, she asked.Judgement to distinguish right and wrong, vision to see the truth, and courage to act upon it, dedication to that which is good, integrity to stand by the good at any price."

"He tried to explain and to convince. He knew, while he spoke, that it was useless, because his words sounded as if they were hitting a vacuum. There was no such person as Mrs. Wayne Wilmot; there was only a shell containing the opinions of her friends, the picture postcards she had seen, the novels of country squires she had read; it was this that he had to address, this immateriality which could not hear him or answer, deaf and impersonal like a wad of cotton."

"No man can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation , an unrewarded duty or an involuntary servitude on another man.There can be no such thing as " the right to enslave ."

"The entire history of science is a progression of exploded fallacies."

"My greatest personal mistake is ever to allow a word or moment that "doesn't count," i.e., that I do not refer to my own basic principles. Every word, every action, every moment counts. (This is the pattern on which everybody makes mistakes [or] becomes irrational - not relating their one action or one conviction to another."

"What glory can there be in the conquest of a mindless body?"

"There is only one path to heaven. On Earth we call it Love."

"A desire presupposes the possibility of action to achieve it; action presupposes a goal which is worth achieving."

"I never found beauty in longing for the impossible and never found the possible to be beyond my reach."

"Hence the sterile, uninspiring futility of a great many theoretical discussions of ethics, and the resentment which many people feel towards such discussions: moral principles remain in their minds as floating abstractions, offering them a goal they cannot grasp and demanding that they reshape their souls in its image, thus leaving them with a burden of undefinable moral guilt."

"Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law."

"Dagny leaned back in her chair. The short sentence was a shock. It was not merely relief: it was the sudden realization that nothing else was necessary to guarantee that it would be done; she needed no proofs, no questions, no explanations; a complex problem could rest safely on three syllables pronounced by a man who knew what he was saying."

"He knew that the dread in these men's minds was not of the fact, but of his naming it-as if the fact had not existed, but his words held the power to make it exist."

"Beauty is a sense of harmony."

"Contrary to the ecologists, nature does not stand still and does not maintain the kind of equilibrium that guarantees the survival of any particular species - least of all the survival of her greatest and most fragile product: man."

"And, after all, you've got to live. "Not that way, said Roark."

"Do not ever say that the desire to "do good" by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives."

"I love doing it. Every building is like a person. Single and unrepeatable."

"We are born into this world unarmed - our mind is our only weapon."

"Notice how they'll accept anything except a man who stands alone. They recognize him at once...There's a special, insidious kind of hatred for him. They forgive criminals. They admire dictators. Crime and violence are a tie. A form of mutual dependence. They need ties. They've got to force their miserable little personalities on every single person they meet. The independent man kills them-because they don't exist within him and that's the only form of existence they know. Notice the malignant kind of resentment against any idea that propounds independence. Notice the malice toward an independent man."

"I stand here on the summit of the mountain. I lift my head and I spread my arms. This, my body and spirit, this is the end of the quest. I wished to know the meaning of all things. I am the meaning. I wished to find a warrant for being. I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction. 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 sacrifice on their alters."

"I take the only desire one can really permit oneself. Freedom, Alvah, freedom."You call that freedom? "To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing."

"To love is to value. Only a rationally selfish man, a man of self-esteem, is capable of love-because he is the only man capable of holding firm, consistent, uncompromising, unbetrayed values. The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone."

"Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade..."

"A good novel is an indivisible sum: every scene, sequence and passage of a good novel has to involve, contribute to and advance all three of its major attributes: theme, plot, characterization."