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.
Ayn RandCompromise now, because you'll have to later, anyway, only then you'll have gone through things you'll wish you hadn't.
Ayn RandCan you sacrifice a few? When those few are the best? Deny the best its right to the top--and you have no best left. What are your masses but millions of dull, shriveled, stagnant souls that have no thoughts of their own, no dreams of their own, no will of their own, who eat and sleep and chew helplessly the words others put into their brains? And for those you would sacrifice the few who know life, who are life? I loathe [Andrei] your ideals because I know no worse injustice than the giving of the undeserved. Because men are not equal in ability and one can't trust them as if they were.
Ayn RandMan's basic vice, the source of all his evils, is the act of unfocusing his mind, the suspension of his consciousness, which is not blindness, but the refusal to see, not ignorance, but the refusal to know.
Ayn RandI never found beauty in longing for the impossible and never found the possible to be beyond my reach.
Ayn RandIt was the only thing I ever really wanted. And thatโs the sin that canโt be forgiven--that I hadnโt done what I wanted. It feels so dirty and pointless and monstrous, as one feels about insanity, because thereโs no sense to it, no dignity, nothing but pain--and wasted pain...why do they always teach us that itโs easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? Itโs the hardest thing in the world--to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage.
Ayn Rand