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.
Ayn Rand's 'philosophy' is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society.... To justify and...
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 never found beauty in longing for the impossible and never found the possible to be beyond my reach.
The age of the skyscraper is gone. This is the age of the housing project. Which is always a prelude to the age of the cave.
No happy person can be quite so impervious to pain (Gail Wynand to Dominique Francon)
The view that man was ever to be drawn by some vision of the unattainable shining ahead, doomed ever to aspire, but not to achieve, my life and my values could not bring me to that.
Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. Their goals differed, but they all had this in common: that the step was first, the...
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.
A painting shouldn't be just a picture, it should be a philosophy.
To irrational principles, one cannot be loyal. Ideas that are not derived from reality cannot be consistently practiced in reality.--as quoted by Leonard Peikoff in "Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn...
He tried to explain and to convince. He knew, while he spoke, that it was useless, because his words sounded as if they were hitting a vacuum. There was no such person as Mrs. Wayne Wilmot; there was...
No! I don't want to speak of that! But I'm going to. I want you to hear. I want you to know what's in store for you. There will be days when you'll look at your hands and you'll want to take something...
Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man’s values, it has to be earned.His own happiness is man’s only moral purpose, but only his own virtue can a...
If you're rational you don't get to believe whatever you want to believe.
Saint Petersburg in revolt gave us Vladimir Nabokov, Isaiah Berlin, and Ayn Rand. The first was a novelist, the second a philosopher. The third was neither but thought she was both.
A castaway in the sea was going down for the third time when he caught sight of a passing ship. Gathering his last strength, he waved frantically and called for help. Someone on board peered at him sc...
Charity must be voluntary.
Thinking is man’s only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: th...
Thousands of years ago the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burnt at the stake he'd taught his brothers to light, but he left them a gift they had not conceived and he lifted dar...
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