Ayn Rand

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

Wealth is the product of a man’s ability to think.

If it were true that men could achieve their good by means of turning some men into sacrificial animals, and … if I were asked to serve the interests of society apart from, above and against my own I would refuse….I would fight in the full confidence of the justice of my battle and of a living being’s right to exist.

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

Some things have to be believed to be seen.

It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to put him in possesion of the truth.

Do you realize that you can’t play the game of life with sweaty palms?

He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.

We Americans… bear the ark of liberties of the world.

Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.

Life is not an easy matter… You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

We lift ourselves by our thoughts. We climb upon our vision of ourselves.

Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.

A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.

You can’t change what you don’t acknowledge.

We ought to know more about the families who founded this nation, and how they lived. One way to do this is to reconstruct as nearly as possible the conditions under which they lived.

What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do.