Shrugged Ayn Quotes

#1. I have never felt guilty of my ability. I have never felt guilty of my mind. I have never felt guilty of being a man. I accepted no unearned guilt, and thus was free to earn and to know my own value.

Ayn Rand

#2. The source of work? Man's mind ... man's reasoning mind.

Ayn Rand

#3. Her face was made of angular planes, the shape of her mouth clear-cut, a sensual mouth held closed with inflexible precision. She kept her hands in the coat pockets, her posture taut, as if she resented immobility ...

Ayn Rand

#4. This was the simple essence of his universe: the instantaneous refusal to submit to disaster, the irresistible drive to fight it, the triumphant feeling of his own ability to win.

Ayn Rand

#5. Our first rule here ... is that one must always see for oneself.

Ayn Rand

#6. The capacity for unclouded enjoyment, she thought, does not belong to irresponsible fools; an inviolate peace of spirit is not the achievement of a drifter; to be able to laugh like that is the end result of the most profound, most solemn thinking.

Ayn Rand

#7. There is no conflict of interests among men, neither in business nor in trade nor in their most personal desires - if they omit the irrational from their view of the possible and destruction from their view of the practical?

Ayn Rand

#8. The human shapes moving past him in the streets of the city were physical objects without any meaning.

Ayn Rand

#9. He knew that the conference was a trap; he knew also that he was walking into it with nothing for any trappers to gain.

Ayn Rand

#10. Or did you say it's the love of money that's the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. 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.

Ayn Rand

#11. She had always avoided personal reactions, but she was forced to break her rule when she saw the expression on his face. She burst out laughing.

Ayn Rand

#12. To the extent to which a man is rational, life is the premise directing his actions. To the extent to which he is irrational, the premise directing his actions is death.

Ayn Rand

#13. But why?"
"You goddamn fool, do you think I consider their question debatable?

Ayn Rand

#14. There was an expert competence in his manner of working; his movements were easy, intelligently economical.

Ayn Rand

#15. She sat at the window of the train, her head thrown back, one leg stretched across to the empty seat before her. The window frame trembled with the speed of the motion, the pane hung over empty darkness, and dots of light slashed across the glass as luminous streaks, once in a while.

Ayn Rand

#16. All work is an act of creating and comes from the same source: from an inviolate capacity to see through one's own eyes - which means: the capacity to perform a rational identification -which means: the capacity to see, to connect and to make what had not been seen, connected and made before.

Ayn Rand

#17. Tension seemed natural to her, not a sign of anxiety, but a sign of enjoyment ...

Ayn Rand

#18. She stood beside him, sagging in his arms, abandoning herself to anything he wished, in open acknowledgment of his power to reduce her to helplessness by the pleasure he had the power to give her.

Ayn Rand

#19. She wondered at the joyous, proud comfort to be found in a sense of the finite, in the knowledge that the field of one's concern lay within the realm of one's sight.

Ayn Rand

#20. Do I strike you as a man with a miserable inferiority complex?"
"Good God, no!"
"Only that kind of man spends his life running after women.

Ayn Rand

#21. We lived by that which we held to be good and punished that which we held to be evil. You live by that which you denounce as evil and punish that which you know to be good.

Ayn Rand

#22. Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?

Ayn Rand

#23. She marveled at the futility of his method: he was acting as if, by naming her opinion in advance, he would make her unable to alter it.

Ayn Rand

#24. All work is an act of philosophy. And when men will learn to consider productive work - and that which is its source - as the standard of their moral values, they will reach that state of perfection which is the birthright they lost..

Ayn Rand

#25. She felt an odd, light-hearted indifference, as if she suddenly wanted nothing but the comfort of surrendering to helplessness.

Ayn Rand

#26. Dagny's bearing seemed almost indecent, because this was the way a woman would have faced a ballroom centuries ago, when the act of displaying one's half-naked body for the admiration of men was an act of daring, when it had meaning, and but one meaning, acknowledged by all as a high adventure.

Ayn Rand

#27. He walked with an effortless speed, feeling relaxed by a form of activity that was natural to him.

Ayn Rand

#28. There's no way to make the irrational work.

Ayn Rand

#29. Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone.

Ayn Rand

#30. What books didn't influence me? If only someone would ask that! I've been waiting for years to answer it. Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, I will say, had absolutely no influence on me except to cause hours of incredulous boredom.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#31. He was accustomed to hostility; this kind of benevolence was more offensive than hostility. He shrugged; he thought that he would be out of here soon and back in the simple, clean reality of his own office.

Ayn Rand

#32. I'm not going to help you pretend - by arguing with you - that the reality you're talking about is not what it is, that there's still a way to make it work and to save your neck. There isn't.

Ayn Rand

#33. Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence.

Ayn Rand

#34. If you intend to keep your word, don't talk about it, just do it.

Ayn Rand

#35. It only stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.

Ayn Rand

#36. You have sacrificed justice to mercy. You have sacrificed independence to unity. You have sacrificed reason to faith. You have sacrificed wealth to need. You have sacrificed self-esteem to self-denial. You have sacrificed happiness to duty.

Ayn Rand

#37. If you don't know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn.

Ayn Rand

#38. Watching Larkin's efforts, Rearden felt what he did when he watched an ant struggling under the load of a matchstick. It's so hard for him, thought Rearden, and so easy for me.

Ayn Rand

#39. John, the self-made man, self-made in every sense, out of nowhere, penniless, parentless, tie-less ... but I've always thought of him as if he had come into the world like Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, who sprang forth from Jupiter's head, fully grown and fully armed.

Ayn Rand

#40. He stood looking at her as if it took all of his effort to keep his eyes directed at her face, to keep seeing her, to endure the sight. "What do you want?" he asked.

Ayn Rand

#41. There was no guilt in his face, no doubt, nothing but the calm of an inviolate self-confidence.

Ayn Rand

#42. Logic rests on the axiom that existence exists. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification.

Ayn Rand

#43. No action could be lower or more futile than for one person to throw upon another the burden of his abdication of choice.

Ayn Rand

#44. To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort.

Ayn Rand

#45. She felt that his presence seemed more intensely real when she kept her eyes away from him, almost as if the stressed awareness of herself came from him, like the sunlight from the water.

Ayn Rand

#46. No battle was hard, no decision was dangerous where there was no soggy uncertainty, no shapeless evasion to encounter.

Ayn Rand

#47. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies...It is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the concept of 'Value' possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.

Ayn Rand

#48. Both of them smiled derisively. But Francisco seemed to laugh at things because he saw something much greater. Jim laughed as if he wanted to let nothing remain great.

Ayn Rand

#49. He seemed casually at home, as if he felt that the place belonged to them, as they always felt wherever they went together.

Ayn Rand

#50. (LuAnn) Whatever. That'll teach me not to build my life around a man whose favorite book is Atlas Shrugged. Listen, kid." She waggles her finger, as if scolding me. "Nothing good comes from Ayn RAnd. Trust me on this.

Abby McDonald

#51. What glory can there be in the conquest of a mindless body?

Ayn Rand

#52. Do not cry that it is our duty to serve you. We do not recognize such duty. Do not cry that you need us. We do not consider need a claim. Do not cry that you own us. You don't.

Ayn Rand

#53. She had always looked for sparks of competence, like a diamond prospector in an unpromising wasteland.

Ayn Rand

#54. If you came here dressed like this in order not to let me notice how lovely you are," he said, "you miscalculated. You're lovely. I wish I could tell you what a relief it is to see a face that's intelligent though a woman's. But you don't want to hear it. That's not what you came here for.

Ayn Rand

#55. Observe the ugly mess which most men make of their sex lives - and observe the mess of contradictions which they hold as their moral philosophy.

Ayn Rand

#56. I had made my fortune by being able to spot a certain kind of man. The kind who never asked you for faith, hope and charity, but offered you facts, proof and profit.

Ayn Rand

#57. They say that it's hard for men to agree. You'd be surprised how easy it is - when both parties hold as their moral absolute that neither exists for the sake of the other and that reason is their only means of trade.

Ayn Rand

#58. I refuse to apologize for my ability - I refuse to apologize for my success - I refuse to apologize for my money.

Ayn Rand

#59. A process of reason is a process of constant choice in answer to the question: True or False? - Right or Wrong?

Ayn Rand

#60. I like to deal with somebody who has no illusions about getting favors.

Ayn Rand

#61. But don't I have any freedom of speech?"
"In your own house. Not in mine."
"Don't I have a right to my own ideas?"
"At your own expense. Not at mine."
"Don't you tolerate any differences of opinion?"
"Not when I'm paying the bills.

Ayn Rand

#62. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.

Ayn Rand

#63. Wondering how one went about forcing one's mind into blankness, particularly after a lifetime lived on the axiom that the constant, clearest, most ruthless function of his rational faculty was his foremost duty.

Ayn Rand

#64. To fear to face an issue to believe that the worst is true.
Atlas Shrugged

Ayn Rand

#65. You always play it open, don't you?" he asked.
"I've never noticed you doing otherwise."
"I thought I was the only one who could afford to.

Ayn Rand

#66. This sense of eagerness, of hope and of secret excitement. It was as if normal existence were a photograph of shapeless things in badly printed colors, but this was a sketch done in a few sharp strokes that made things seem clean, important - and worth doing.

Ayn Rand

#67. We will not deal with men on any terms but ours - and our terms are a moral code which holds that man is an end in himself and not the means to any end of others. We do not seek to force our code upon them. They are free to believe what they please.

Ayn Rand

#68. No matter what night preceded it, she had never known a morning when she did not feel the rise of a quiet excitement that became a tightening energy in her body and a hunger for action in her mind - because this was the beginning of day and it was a day of her life.

Ayn Rand

#69. When you violate the rights of one man, you have violated the rights of all, and a public of rightless creatures is doomed to destruction.

Ayn Rand

#70. She had been proved right so eloquently, she had thought, that comments were unnecessary.

Ayn Rand

#71. It was the only lie she ever told. She did not do it to protect Francisco; she did it because she felt, for some reason which she could not define, that the incident was a secret too precious to share.

Ayn Rand

#72. Reality is that which exists; the unreal does not exist; the unreal is merely that negation of existence which is the content of a human consciousness when it attempts to abandon reason. Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man's only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.

Ayn Rand

#73. There was so calm, so natural, so total a certainty in the sound of her voice that the mere sound seemed to carry an immense persuasiveness.

Ayn Rand

#74. Ask yourself what it is that a code of moral values does to a man's life, and why he can't exist without it, and what happens to him if he accepts the wrong standard, by which the evil is the good.

Ayn Rand

#75. Indifference to me, is the epitome of all evil.

Elie Wiesel

#76. Dagny, why is it that most women would never admit that, but you do?"
"Because they're never sure that they ought to be wanted. I am."
"I do admire self-confidence."
"Self-confidence was only one part of what I said, Hank."
"What's the whole?"
"Confidence of my value - and yours.

Ayn Rand

#77. It was as if he were a single whole, grasped by her first glance at him, like some irreducible absolute, like an axiom not to be explained any further, as if she knew everything about him by direct perception, and what awaited her now was only the process of identifying her knowledge.

Ayn Rand

#78. She saw both serenity and suffering in the calm of his face, an expression like a smile of pain, though he was not smiling ... He did not look like a man bearing torture now, but like a man who sees that which makes the torture worth bearing.

Ayn Rand

#79. Accepting a man's hospitality is a token of good will, a declaration that you and your host stand on terms of a civilized relationship.

Ayn Rand

#80. Humanity's darkest evil, the most destructive horror machine among all the devices of men, is non-objective law..

Ayn Rand

#81. The justice which would forgive miles of innocent errors of knowledge, would not forgive a single step taken in conscious evil.

Ayn Rand

#82. They kept their secret from the knowledge of others, not as a shameful guilt, but as a thing that was immaculately theirs, beyond anyone's right of debate or appraisal.

Ayn Rand

#83. She never knew where he was, in what city or on what continent, the day after she had seen him. He always came to her unexpectedly - and she liked it, because it made him a continuous presence in her life, like the ray of a hidden light that could hit her at any moment.

Ayn Rand

#84. She wanted to tell him of the years she had spent looking for men such as he to work with; she wanted to tell him that his enemies were hers, that she was fighting the same battle ...

Ayn Rand

#85. Incredulity and indifference were her only reaction: incredulity, because she could not conceive of what would bring human beings to such a state - indifference, because she could not regard those who reached it, as human any longer.

Ayn Rand

#86. Here, we trade achievements, not failures - values, not needs. We're free of one another, yet we all grow together.

Ayn Rand

#87. He looked at her with a touch of defiance, as if waiting for an angry answer. But her answer was worse than anger: her face remained expressionless, as if the truth or falsehood of his convictions were of no concern to her any longer.

Ayn Rand

#88. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

Ayn Rand

#89. It is here, it exists - but one must enter it naked and alone, with no rags from the falsehoods of centuries, with the purest clarity of mind - not an innocent heart, but that which is much rarer: an intransigent mind - as one's only possession and key.

Ayn Rand

#90. He was seeing the full extent of her failure - in the immensity of his own indifference. The droning stream of her insults was like the sound of a distant riveting machine, a long, impotent pressure that reached nothing within him.

Ayn Rand

#91. If any part of your uncertainty is a conflict between your heart and your mind - follow your mind.

Ayn Rand

#92. Throughout his life, whenever he became convinced that a course of action was right, the desire to follow it had come automatically.

Ayn Rand

#93. She sat, bent over, her head on her arms. She did not move, but the strands of hair, hanging down to her knees, trembled in sudden jolts once in a while.

Ayn Rand

#94. Their terror had the evasive quality of guilt: it was not the fear that comes from understanding, but from the refusal to understand.

Ayn Rand

#95. Since life requires a specific course of action, any other course will destroy it. A being who does not hold his own life as the motive and goal of his actions, is acting on the motive and standard of death.

Ayn Rand

#96. He did not know that he was expected to attempt to buy his way into society and that they anticipated the pleasure of rejecting him. He had no time to notice their disappointment.

Ayn Rand

#97. It is not proper for man's life to be a circle, she thought, or a string of circles dropping off like zeros behind him - man's life must be a straight line of motion from goal to farther goal, each leading to the next and to a single growing sum.

Ayn Rand

#98. Those who wish to deal with me, must do so on my terms or not at all. I do not make terms with incompetence.

Ayn Rand

#99. It seemed to her that it was not a look of greeting after an absence, but the look of someone who had thought of her every day of that year.

Ayn Rand

#100. Her leg, sculptured by the tight sheen of the stocking, its long line running straight, over an arched instep, to the tip of a foot in a high-heeled pump, had a feminine elegance that seemed out of place in the dusty train car ...

Ayn Rand