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 road new, the vision unborrowed, and the response they received — hatred. The great creators — the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors — stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new thought was opposed. Every great new invention was denounced. The first motor was considered foolish. The airplane was considered impossible. The power loom was considered vicious. Anesthesia was considered sinful. But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered and they paid. But they won.


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 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
God... a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive.
AYN RAND