269 Quotes by Nathaniel Branden

When we doubt our minds, we tend to discount its products. If we fear intellectual self-assertiveness, perhaps associating it with loss of love, we mute our intelligence. We dread being visible; so we make ourselves invisible, then suffer because no one sees us.

If I am unwilling to take responsibility for the attainment of my desires, they are not really desires – they are merely daydreams.

Sometimes people who feel fear in the human realm drop to a very low level of consciousness in their relationships and seek the safety and security of competence in the impersonal word of machines, mathematics, or abstract thought.

Regardless of what we think we’re teaching, we teach what we are.

Force, governmental coercion, is the instrument by which the ethics of altruism – the belief that the individual exists to serve others – is translated into political reality.

The real basic power of an individual isn’t what he or she knows; it’s the ability to think and learn and face new challenges.

Romantic love can be terrifying. We experience another human being as enormously important to us. So there is surrender - not a surrender to the other person so much as to our feeling for the other person. What is the obstacle? The possibility of loss.

What is guilt? It is moral self-reproach--I did wrongwhen it was possible to have done otherwise.