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.
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.
She sat beside him in the car, feeling no desire to speak, knowing that neither of them could conceal the meaning of their silence.
There was an air of luxury about the room, but it was the luxury of expert simplicity.
You can’t have your cake and let your neighbour eat it too.
To what level of depravity has a society descended when it condemns a man simply because he is strong and great?
Man, whose tool of survival is the mind, does not merely fail to teach a child to think, but devotes the child’s education to the purpose of destroying his brain, of convincing him that thought is futile and evil, before he has started to think.
The air is pure under the ground. There is no odor of men.
A battle? What battle? I hold the whip hand. I don’t fight the disarmed.” “Are they? They have a weapon against you. It’s their only weapon, but it’s a terrible one. Ask yourself what it is, some time.” “Where do you see any evidence of it?” “In the unforgivable fact that you’re as unhappy as you are.
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.
Dare not choose in your minds the work you would like to do when you leave the Home of the Students. You shall do what the Council of Vocations shall prescribe for you.
Those who wish to deal with me, must do so on my terms or not at all. I do not make terms with incompetence.
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.
She moved through formal receptions, theater parties, dinners, dances – gracious and smiling, a smile that made her face brighter and colder, like the sun on a winter day.
The thinking child seeks equals; the conformist seeks protectors.
It was the smile of a man who is able to see, to know and to create the glory of existence. It was the mocking, challenging smile of a brilliant intelligence.
Incredulity and indifference were her only reaction: incredulity, because she could not conceive of what would bring human beings to such a state – indifference, because she could not regard those who reached it, as human any longer.
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.
Whenever, in any era, culture, or society, you encounter the phenomenon of prejudice, injustice, persecution, and blind, unreasoning hatred directed at some minority group – look for the gang that has something to gain from that persecution, look for those who have a vested interest in the destruction of these particular sacrificial victims. Invariably, you will find that the persecuted minority serves as a scapegoat for some movement that does not want the nature of its own goals to be known.
I don’t want to fight for the people, I don’t want to fight against the people, I don’t want to hear of the people. I want to be left alone – to live.