Zitat des Tages von Ayn Rand:
Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.
The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap.
Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice.
A desire presupposes the possibility of action to achieve it; action presupposes a goal which is worth achieving.
Evil requires the sanction of the victim.
So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of all money?
Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.
Money is the barometer of a society's virtue.
Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).
We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.
Just as man can't exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one's rights into reality, to think, to work and keep the results, which means: the right of property.
Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision.
From the smallest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from one attribute of man - the function of his reasoning mind.
Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think.
The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.
A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.
Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future.
People create their own questions because they are afraid to look straight. All you have to do is look straight and see the road, and when you see it, don't sit looking at it - walk.
There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.
The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see.
To say 'I love you' one must first be able to say the 'I.'
God... a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive.
Do not ever say that the desire to 'do good' by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.
When I die, I hope to go to Heaven, whatever the Hell that is.
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.
The worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt.
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.
I don't build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.
Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.
Man's unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself.
Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values.
There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.
If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.
To achieve, you need thought. You have to know what you are doing and that's real power.
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.
The truth is not for all men, but only for those who seek it.
