Quotes from Ayn Rand

The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me.

I dont work with collectives. I don't consult, i don't co-operate, I don't collaborate.

Before you can do things for people, you must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the secondary consequences. The work, not the people. Your own action, not any possible object of your charity.

She had never done these things before; she did them expertly. She had a capacity for action, a competence that clashed incongruously with her appearance.

When numbers are substituted for morality, and no individual can claim a right, but any gang can assert any desire whatever, when compromise is the only policy expected of those in power, and the preservation of the moment's "stability," of peace at any price, is their only goal—the winner, necessarily, is whoever presents the most unjust and irrational demands; the system serves as an open invitation to do so.

He felt, as passionately as he had ever felt it, that she was the most desirable woman on earth; but what came from it was only a desire to desire her, a wish to feel, not a feeling.

In the transition to statism, every infringement of human rights has begun with a given right's least attractive practitioners

She's a writer. The kind of writer who wouldn't be published outside. She believes that when one deals with words, one deals with the mind.

The shortest distance between two points is not a straight line—it's a middleman. And the more middlemen, the shorter.

I want to drink. I want a woman like you. I want to go down, as far as you can drag me.

It's a law of survival, isn't it?—to seek the best. I didn't come for your sake. I came for mine.

I think it's a worthy undertaking--to provide a decent apartment for a man who earns fifteen dollars a week. But not at the expense of other men. Not if it raises the taxes, raises all the other rents and makes the man who earns forty live in a rat hole.