Quotes By Person: Ayn Rand

“'Then why are you going there?'

'Because I haven't tried it before. That's all there is left to try. It's somewhere to go. Just to keep moving... You know,' he added suddenly, 'I don't think it will be any use. But there's nothing to do in the East except sit under some hedge and wait to die. I don't think I mind it much now, the dying. I know it would be a lot easier. Only I think it's a sin to sit down and let your life go without making a try for it.'”

-Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand

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“If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater the effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders -- what would you tell him to do?

I...don't know. What...could he do? What would you tell him?

To shrug.”

-Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand

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“The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide -- as, I think, he will. Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips, and guns -- or dollars. Take your choice -- there is no other -- and your time is running out.”

-Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand

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“I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. Particularly when one can't see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window - no, I don't feel how small I am - but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.”

-The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

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“No, you can't ruin an architect by proving that he's a bad architect. But you can ruin him because he's an atheist, or because somebody sued him, or because he slept with some woman, or because he pulls wings off bottleflies. You'll say it doesn't make sense? Of course it doesn't. That's why it works. Reason can be fought with reason. How are you going to fight the unreasonable? The trouble with you, my dear, and with most people, is that you don't have sufficient respect for the senseless. The senseless is the major factor in our lives. You have no chance if it is your enemy. But if you can make it become your ally -- ah, my dear!”

-The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

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“So, you people made a martyr out of me, after all. And that is the one thing I've tried all my life not to be. It's so graceless, being a martyr. It's honoring your adversaries too much. But I'll tell you this, Alvah - I'll tell it to you, because I couldn't find a less appropriate person to hear it: nothing that you do to me - or to him - will be worse than what I'll do to myself. If you think I can't take the Stoddard Temple, wait till you see what I can take.”

-The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

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“The question isn't 'who is going to let me'; it's 'who is going to stop me.'”

-The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

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“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.”

-The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

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“There will be days when a bus driver snaps at you as you enter a bus, and he'll be only asking for a dime, but that won't be what you'll hear; you'll hear that you're nothing, that he's laughing at you, that it's written on your forehead, that thing they hate you for.”

-The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

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“There's nothing as significant as a human face. Nor as eloquent. We can never really know another person, except by our first glance at him. Because, in that glance, we know everything. Even though we're not always wise enough to unravel the knowledge.”

-The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

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

-The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, Ayn Rand

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“A chronic lack of pleasure, of any enjoyable, rewarding or stimulating experiences, produces a slow, gradual, day-by-day erosion of man's emotional vitality, which he may ignore or repress, but which is recorded by the relentless computer of his subconscious mechanism that registers an ebbing flow, then a trickle, then a few last drops of fuel--until the day when his inner motor stops and he wonders desperately why he has no desire to go on, unable to find any definable cause of his hopeless, chronic sense of exhaustion.”

-The Voice Of Reason, Ayn Rand

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