Ferris: Are you going to be as impractical as that? Rearden: The evaluation of an action as practical, Dr. Ferris, depends on what it is that one wishes to practice. Ferris: Haven't you always placed your self-interest above all else? Rearden: That is what I am doing right now.

Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.

The government was set to protect man from criminals, and the Constitution was written to protect man from the government.

For they have nothing to fight me with, save the brute force of their numbers. I have my mind.

We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality

Did it ever occur to you, that 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?

To hold an unchanging youth is to reach at the end, the vision with which one started.