It's strange. There's your life. You begin it, feeling that it's something so precious and rare, so beautiful that it's like a sacred treasure. Now it's over, and it doesn't make any difference to anyone, and it isn't that they are indifferent, it's just that they don't know, they don't know what it means, that treasure of mine, and there's something about it that they should understand. I don't understand it myself, but there's something that should be understood by all of us. Only what is it? What?
Ayn RandAquinas brought an Aristotelian view of reason back into European culture, and lighted the way toward the Renaissance.
Ayn RandNow look at me! Take a good look! I was born and I knew I was alive and I knew what I wanted. What do you think is alive in me? Why do you think I'm alive? Because I have a stomach and eat and digest the food? Because I breathe and work and produce more food to digest? Or because I know what I want, and that something which knows how to wantโisn't that life itself? And whoโin this damned universeโwho can tell me why I should live for anything but for that which I want?
Ayn RandThere are four characteristics which brand a country unmistakably as a dictatorship: one-party rule, executions without trial or with a mock trial for political offenses, the nationalization or expropriation of private property, and censorship. A country guilty of these outrages forfeits any moral prerogatives, any claim to national rights or sovereignty, and becomes an outlaw.
Ayn RandRacism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a manโs genetic lineage-the notion that a manโs intellectual and characterologic al traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry.
Ayn Rand