"One gains a profoundly personal, selfish joy from the mere existence of the person one loves. It is one's own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns and derives from love."

"Words are a lens to focus one's mind."

"Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed."

"Men hate passion, any great passion. Henry Cameron made a mistake : he loved his work. That was why he fought. That was why he lost."

"An inventor is a man who asks 'Why?' of the universe and lets nothing stand between the answer and his mind."

"All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good, all that which destroys it is the evil."

"She could not descend to an existence where her brain would explode under the pressure of forcing itself not to outdistance incompetence. She could not function to the rule of: Pipe down-keep down-slow down-don't do your best, it is not wanted!"

"But this was that view of human destiny which she had most passionately hated and rejected: the view that man was ever to be drawn by some vision of the unattainable shining ahead, doomed ever to aspire, but not to achieve. Her life and her values could not bring her to that, she thought; she had never found beauty in longing for the impossible and had never found the possible to be beyond her reach."

"Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?"

"Now look at me! Take a good look! I was born and I knew I was alive and I knew what I wanted. What do you think is alive in me? Why do you think I'm alive? Because I have a stomach and eat and digest the food? Because I breathe and work and produce more food to digest? Or because I know what I want, and that something which knows how to want-isn't that life itself? And who-in this damned universe-who can tell me why I should live for anything but for that which I want?"

"Logic rests on the axiom that existence exists. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification."

"Since life requires a specific course of action, any other course will destroy it. A being who does not hold his own life as the motive and goal of his actions, is acting on the motive and standard of death."

"There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist."

"Sacrifice does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious."

"We knew not where we were going. We only knew that we must run, run to the end of the world, run to the end of our days."

"Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth, the man who would make his fortune no matter where he started."

"Neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as man is free to attempt to survive in any random manner, but will perish unless he lives as his nature requires, so he is free to seek his happiness in any mindless fraud, but the torture of frustration is all he will find, unless he seeks the happiness proper to man. The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live."

"Dagny," he said, looking at the city as it moved past their taxi window, "think of the first man who thought of making a steel girder. He knew what he saw, what he thought and what he wanted. He did not say, 'It seems to me,' and he did not take orders from those who say, 'In my opinion."

"We are those who do not disconnect the values of their minds from the actions of their bodies, those who do not leave their values to empty dreams, but bring them into existence, those who give material form to thoughts, and reality to values."

"Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force. man had no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle. He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons,and to make weapons - a process of thought. From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and we have comes from a single attribute of man -the function of his reasoning mind."

"If I found a job, a project, an idea or a person I wanted-I'd have to depend on the whole world. Everything has strings leading to everything else. We're all so tied together. We're all in a net, the net is waiting and it's precious to you. Do you know who is standing ready to tear it out of your hands? You can't know, it may be so involved and so far away, but someone is ready, and you're afraid of them all. And you cringe and you crawl and you beg and you accept them-just so they'll let you keep it. And look at whom you come to accept."

"A rational man never distorts or corrupts his own standards...in order to appeal to the irrationality, dishonesty or stupidity of others."

"There can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions to an individual, but permitted to a mob."

"Well, whose opinion did you take? "I don't ask for opinions." "What do you go by?"Judgment. "Well, whose judgment did you take? "Mine. "But whom did you consult about it?". "Nobody."

"There is no such thing as "the right to enslave".A nation can do it , just as a man can become a criminal - but neither can do it by right. It doesn't matter in this context, whether a nation was enslaved by force (like soviet Russia), or by vote (like Nazi Germany)."

"Every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics - a rational ethics - as a precondition of rebirth."

"My real soul...? It's real only when it's independent..."

"We fell, but we never let the box fall from our hands. Then we ran. We ran blindly, and men and houses streaked past us in a torrent without shape."

"The view that man was ever to be drawn by some vision of the unattainable shining ahead, doomed ever to aspire, but not to achieve, my life and my values could not bring me to that."

"It does take an exceptional mind and a still more exceptional integrity to remain untouched by the brain-destroying influences of the world's doctrines, the accumulated evil of centuries-to remain human, since the human is the rational."

"From the smallest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from one attribute of man - the function of his reasoning mind."

"No speech is ever considered, but only the speaker. It's so much easier to pass judgement on a man than on an idea."

"She lay on her back, looking up at the sky, feeling no desire to move or think or know that there was any time beyond this moment."

"I worship individuals for their highest possibilities as individuals and I loathe humanity for its failure to live up to these possibilities."

"Productive work is the central purpose of a rational man's life the central value that integrates and determines the hierarchy of all his other values. Reason is the source the precondition of his productive work - pride is the result."

"Whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man's nature and of life's potential."

"Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions-and you'll learn that man's mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth."

"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."

"Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting for us in our graves - or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth."

"We alone, of the thousands who walk this earth, we alone in this hour are doing a work which has no purpose save that we wish to do it."

"The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws."

"If, to him, love was a celebration of one's self and of existence-then, to the self-haters and life-haters, the pursuit of destruction was the only form and equivalent of love."

"She sat listening to the music. It was a symphony of triumph. The notes flowed up, they spoke of rising and they were the rising itself, they were the essence and the form of upward motion, they seemed to embody every human act and thought that had ascent as its motive. It was a sunburst of sound, breaking out of hiding and spreading open. It had the freedom of release and the tension of purpose. It swept space clean, and left nothing but the joy of an unobstructed effort. Only a faint echo within the sounds spoke of that from which the music had escaped, but spoke in laughing astonishment at the discovery that there was no ugliness or pain, and there never had to be. It was the song of an immense deliverance."

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

"So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of all money?"

"There are two things we must get rid of early in life: a feeling of personal superiority and an exaggerated reverence for the sexual act."

"Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone."

"No matter what corruption he's taught about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which he cannot perform for any motive but his own enjoyment-just try to think of performing it in a spirit of selfless charity?-an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in self-exaltation, only in the confidence of being desired and being worthy of desire. It is an act that forces him to stand naked in spirit, as well as in body, and to accept his real ego as his standard of value."

"A rational process is a moral process. You may make an error at any step of it, with nothing to protect you but your own severity, or you may try to cheat, to fake the evidence and evade the effort of the quest - but if devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking."

"She smiled. She knew she was dying. But it did not matter any longer. She had known something which no human words could ever tell and she knew it now. She had been awaiting it and she felt it, as if it had been, as if she had lived it. Life had been, if only because she had known it could be, and she felt it now as a hymn without sound, deep under the little whole that dripped red drops into the snow, deeper than that from which the red drops came. A moment or an eternity- did it matter? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist. She smiled, her last smile, to so much that had been possible."