Ayn Rand

It's not that I don't suffer, it's that I know the unimportance of suffering. I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one's soul and as a permanent scar across one's view of existence.

Your emotional capacity is an empty motor, and your values are the fuel with which your mind fills it. If you choose a mix of contradictions, it will clog your motor, corrode your transmission and wreck you on your first attempt to move with a machine which you, the driver, have corrupted.

We didn't really have to take everything so seriously, did we?

But there are people who'll try to hurt you through the good they see in you--knowing that it's the good, needing it and punishing you for it. Don't let it break you when you discover that.

Why no. I’m too conceited. If you want to call it that. I don’t make comparisons. I never think of myself in relation to anyone else. I just refuse to measure myself as part of anything. I’m an utter egotist.

It's so graceless, being a martyr. It's honoring your adversaries too much.

You have no choice about your capacity to feel that something is good for you or evil, but what you will consider good or evil, what will give you joy or pain, what you will love or hate, desire or fear, depends on your standard of value.

Kira, the highest thing in man is not his god. It's that in him which knows the reverence due a god. And you, Kira, are my highest reverence.

I love you so much that nothing can matter to me - not even you...Only my love- not your answer. Not even your indifference

I don't wish to be the symbol of anything. I'm only myself.

Never ask people. Not about your work. Don't you know what you want? How can you stand it, not to know?

The nation which once held the creed that greatness is achieved by production, is now told that it is achieved by squalor.

Every loneliness is a pinnacle

She did not know what it was about him that had always made her want to see him broken.

To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That's what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul - would you understand why that's much harder?

No happy person can be quite so impervious to pain (Gail Wynand to Dominique Francon)

There is no affirmation without the one who affirms. in this sense, everything to which you grant your love is yours

Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed.

There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.

Psychologically, the choice "to think or not" is the choice "to focus or not." Existentially, the choice "to focus or not" is the choice "to be conscious or not." Metaphysically, the choice "to be conscious or not" is the choice of life or death.

I loathe your ideals because I know no worse injustice than the giving of the undeserved.