1,908 Quotes by Ayn Rand

It was the only lie she ever told. She did not do it to protect Francisco; she did it because she felt, for some reason which she could not define, that the incident was a secret too precious to share.

May knowledge come to us! What is this secret our heart has understood and yet will not reveal to us, although it seems to beat as if it were endeavoring to tell it?

Your ego is your strictest judge.

Do you know what she did today?" He leaned confidentially across the table, pointing at the dishes in the sink. "She went to the market and left all the breakfast dishes there and said she'd do them later. I know what she wanted. She expected me to do them. Well, I'll fool her. I'll leave them just where they are.

By that time, a village half-wit could see what generations of professors had pretended not to notice.

When one acts on pity against justice, it is the good whom one punishes for the sake of the evil; when one saves the guilty from suffering, it is the innocent whom one forces to suffer. There is no escape from justice, nothing can be unearned and unpaid for in the universe, neither in matter nor in spirit—and if the guilty do not pay, then the innocent have to pay it.

All that which proceeds from man’s independent ego is good. All that which proceeds from man’s dependence upon men is evil.

The egotist in the absolute sense is not the man who sacrifices others. He is the man who stands above the need of using others in any manner. He does not function through them. He is not concerned with them in any primary matter. Not in his aim, not in his motive, not in his thinking, not in his desires, not in the source of his energy. He does not exist for any other man—and he asks no other man to exist for him.

Politically, the goal of today’s dominant trendis statism. Philosophically, the goal is theobliteration of reason;psychologically, it is theerosion of ambition.