Kartheek > Kartheek's Quotes

“If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders - What would you tell him?"

I…don't know. What…could he do? What would you tell him?"

To shrug.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world. Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human life. Whether you live or die is an absolute. Whether you have a piece of bread or not, is an absolute. Whether you eat your bread or see it vanish into a looter's stomach, is an absolute.

There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromise is the transmitting rubber tube.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“She did not know the nature of her loneliness. The only words that named it were: This is not the world I expected.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone.”
― Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism

“Men who reject the responsibility of thought and reason can only exist as parasites on the thinking of others.”
― Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism

“In a free society, one does not have to deal with those who are irrational. One is free to avoid them.”
― Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism

“Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer - and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.”
― Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism

“To love is to value. Only a rationally selfish man, a man of self esteem, is capable of love - because he is the only man capable of holding firm, consistent, uncompromising, unbetrayed value. The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone”
― Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism

“In order to deal with reality successfully - to pursue and achieve the values which his life requires - man needs self-esteem; he needs to be confident of his efficacy and worth.”
― Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism

“The ' pleasure' of being drunk is obviously the pleasure of escaping from the responsibility of Consciousness.”
― Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism

“Self-esteem is not a value that, once achieved, is maintained automatically thereafter; like every other human value, including life itself, it can be maintained only by action. Self-esteem, the basic conviction that one is competent to live, can be maintained only so long as one is engaged in a process of growth, only so long as one is committed to the task of increasing one's efficacy. In living entities, nature does not permit stillness: when one ceases to grow, one proceeds to disintegrate--in the mental no less than in the physical.”
― Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism

“Man'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 Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism

“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“When reason fails, the devil helps!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Power is given only to him who dares to stoop and take it ... one must have the courage to dare.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“The fear of appearances is the first symptom of impotence.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Man has it all in his hands, and it all slips through his fingers from sheer cowardice.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment