But this was that view of human destiny which she had most passionately hated and rejected: 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. Her life and her values could not bring her to that, she thought; she had never found beauty in longing for the impossible and had never found the possible to be beyond her reach.


Ayn Rand

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AYN RAND
Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the...
AYN RAND
When I die, I hope to go to Heaven, whatever the Hell that is.
AYN RAND
Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason.
AYN RAND
There can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permit...
AYN RAND
He thought of all the living species that train their young in the art of survival, the cats who tea...
AYN RAND
"Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is th...
AYN RAND
An Individualist is a man who lives for his own sake and by his own mind; he neither sacrifices hims...
AYN RAND
Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the ...
AYN RAND
If you tell a beautiful woman that she is beautiful, what have you given her? It's no more than a fa...
AYN RAND
We are on strike, we, the men of the mind.

We are on strike against self-immolation. We a...
AYN RAND
All I mean is that a board of directors is one or two ambitious men--and a lot of ballast. I mean th...
AYN RAND
If you write a line of zeroes, it´s still nothing.
AYN RAND
Observe how many people evade, rationalize and drive their minds into a state of blind stupor, in dr...
AYN RAND
If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood ru...
AYN RAND
Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future.
AYN RAND
Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed.
AYN RAND
It only stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrif...
AYN RAND
Beauty is a sense of harmony.
AYN RAND
Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artists metaphysical value judgments.
AYN RAND
At first, man was enslaved by the gods. But he broke their chains. Then he was enslaved by the kings...
AYN RAND
Dagny leaned back in her chair. The short sentence was a shock. It was not merely relief: it was the...
AYN RAND
In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are at its worst. In th...
AYN RAND
When you are in love, it means that the person you love is of great personal, selfish importance to ...
AYN RAND
I stand here on the summit of the mountain. I lift my head and I spread my arms. This, my body and s...
AYN RAND
If this is vise I want no virtue.

...

I know what happiness is possible to me ...
AYN RAND
A man's sexual choice is the result and the sum of his fundamental convictions.... He will always be...
AYN RAND
He, too, stood looking at her for a moment--and it seemed to her that it was not a look of greeting ...
AYN RAND
Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human l...
AYN RAND
Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental ...
AYN RAND
But why should you care what people will say? All you have to do is please yourself.
AYN RAND
Men have been taught that it is a virtue to agree with others. But the creator is the man who disagr...
AYN RAND
He liked to observe emotions; they were like red lanterns strung along the dark unknown of another's...
AYN RAND
The man who produces while others dispose of his product is a slave.
AYN RAND
The purpose of the law is not to prevent a future offense, but to punish the one actually committed
AYN RAND
Just as man can't exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one'...
AYN RAND
The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted ...
AYN RAND
The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it. - Atlas Shrugged
AYN RAND