My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose.
Ayn RandLove, friendship, respect, admiration are the emotional response of one man to the virtues of another, the spiritual payment given in exchange for the personal, selfish pleasure which one man derives from the virtues of another manโs character.
Ayn RandIndiscriminate tolerance and indiscriminate condemnation are not two opposites: they are two variants of the same evasion. To declare that โeverybody is whiteโ or โeverybody is blackโ or โeverybody is neither white nor black, but gray,โ is not a moral judgment, but an escape from the responsibility of moral judgment.
Ayn RandThe Founding Fathers were neither passive, death-worshipin g mystics nor mindless, power-seeking looters; as a political group they were a phenomenon unprecedented in history: they were thinkers who were also men of action.
Ayn RandAsk yourself why totalitarian dictatorships find it necessary to pour money and effort into propaganda for their own helpless, chained, gagged slaves, who have no means of protest or defense. The answer is that even the humblest peasant or the lowest savage would rise in blind rebellion, were he to realize that he is being immolated, not to some incomprehensible noble purpose, but to plain, naked human evil.
Ayn Rand