I don’t build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.
The worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt.
Evil requires the sanction of the victim.
Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins.
A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.
Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue.
Every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics – a rational ethics – as a precondition of rebirth.
Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men’s stupidity, but your talent to their reason.
Just as man can’t exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one’s rights into reality, to think, to work and keep the results, which means: the right of property.
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.
Have you felt it too? Have you seen how your best friends love everything about you- except the things that count? And your most important is nothing to them; nothing, not even a sound they can recognize.
She knew that she could not have reached this white serenity except as the sum of all the colors, of all the violence she had known.
I never found beauty in longing for the impossible and never found the possible to be beyond my reach.
Joy is the goal of existence, and joy is not to be stumbled upon, but to be achieved, and the act of treason is to let its vision drown in the swamp of the moment’s torture.
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.
I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle.
If you don’t know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn.
John Galt is Prometheus who changed his mind. After centuries of being torn by vultures in payment for having brought to men the fire of the gods, he broke his chains – and he withdrew his fire – until the day when men withdraw their vultures.
In order to deal with reality successfully – to pursue and achieve the values which his life requires – man needs self-esteem; he needs to be confident of his efficacy and worth.
It is not advisable to venture unsolicited opinions. You should spare yourself the embarrassing discovery of their exact value to your listener.