Ayn Rand

The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap.

To achieve, you need thought. You have to know what you are doing and that's real power.

Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think.

There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.

Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice.

Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.

The truth is not for all men, but only for those who seek it.

The ladder of success is best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity.

I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values.

Believing in fate produces fate. Believing in freedom will create infinite possibilities.

The only purpose of education is to teach a student how to live his life-by developing his mind and equipping him to deal with reality. The training he needs is theoretical, i.e., conceptual. He has to be taught to think, to understand, to integrate, to prove. He has to be taught the essentials of the knowledge discovered in the past-and he has to be equipped to acquire further knowledge by his own effort.

Since a rational man's ambition is unlimited, since his pursuit and achievement of values is a life-long process — and the higher the values, the harder the struggle — he needs a moment, an hour or some period of time in which he can experience the sense of his completed task, the sense of living in a universe where his values have been successfully achieved.

If you want to know the one reason that's taking me back, I'll tell you: I cannot bring myself to abandon to destruction all the greatness of the world, all that which was mine and yours, which was made by us and is still ours by right - because I cannot believe that men refuse to see, that they can remain blind and deaf to us forever, when the truth is ours and their lives depend on accepting it.

I am an innovator. This is a term of distinction, a term of honor, rather than something to hide or apologize for. Anyone who_x000D_ has new or valuable ideas to offer stands outside the intellectual status quo. But the status quo is not a stream, let alone a 'mainstream'._x000D_ It is a stagnant swamp. It is the innovators who carry mankind forward.

What is greatness? I will answer: it is the capacity to live by the three fundamental values of John Galt: reason, purpose, self-esteem.

To fear to face an issue is to believe that the worst is true.

Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man's only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.

The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it.

Capitalism has been called a system of greed—yet it is the system that raised the standard of living of its poorest citizens to heights no collectivist system has ever begun to equal, and no tribal gang can conceive of.

To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men.