William E. > William's Quotes

“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

“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

“Faith is the commitment of one's consciousness to beliefs for which one has no sensory evidence or rational proof. When man rejects reason as his standard of judgement, only one alternative standard remains to him: his feelings. A mystic is a man who treats his feelings as tools of cognition. Faith is the equation of feelings with knowledge”
― Nathaniel Branden, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism

“Psychologically, the choice "to think or not" is the choice "to focus or not." Existentially, the choice "to focus or not" is the choice "to be conscious or not." Metaphysically, the choice "to be conscious or not" is the choice of life or death.”
― Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism

“Remember that rights are moral principles which define and protect a man's freedom of action, but impose no obligations on other men.”
― Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism

“The necessary consequence of man's right to life is his right to self-defense. In a civilized society, force may be used only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. All the reasons which make the initiation of physical force an evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative.

If some "pacifist" society renounced the retaliatory use of force, it would be left helplessly at the mercy of the first thug who decided to be immoral. Such a society would achieve the opposite of its intention: instead of abolishing evil, it would encourage and reward it.”
― Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism

“A Conformist is a man who declares, "It's true because others believe it" - but an Individualist is NOT a man who declares, "It's true because I believe it."
An Individual declares, "I believe it because I see in reason that it is true.”
― Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism

“The precept: “Judge not, that ye be not judged” . . . is an abdication of moral responsibility: it is a moral blank check one gives to others in exchange for a moral blank check one expects for oneself.

There is no escape from the fact that men have to make choices; so long as men have to make choices, there is no escape from moral values; so long as moral values are at stake, no moral neutrality is possible. To abstain from condemning a torturer, is to become an accessory to the torture and murder of his victims.

The moral principle to adopt in this issue, is: “Judge, and be prepared to be judged.”
― 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

“Morality is a code of black and white. When and if men attempt a compromise, it is obvious which side will necessarily lose and which will necessarily profit.”
― Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism

“The respectable family that supports worthless relatives or covers up their crimes in order to "protect the family name"(as if the moral stature of one man could be damaged by the actions of another)
-the bum who boasts that his great-grandfather was an empire-builder, or the small-town spinster who boasts that her maternal great-uncle was a state senator and her third cousin gave a concert at carnegie hall (as if the achievement of one man could rub off on the mediocrity of another)
-the parents who search geneological trees in order to evaluate their prospective son-in-law.
-the celebrity who starts his autobiography with a detailed account of his family history
-All these are samples of racism.”
― Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism

“No man can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation , an unrewarded duty or an involuntary servitude on another man.
There can be no such thing as " the right to enslave .”
― Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism

“There is only one reality - the reality knowable to reason. And if man does not choose to perceive it, there is nothing else for him to perceive; if it is not of this world that he is conscious, then he is not conscious at all”
― Nathaniel Branden, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism

“It is eminently reasonable that men should seek to associate with those who share their convictions and values. It is impossible to deal or even to communicate with men whose ideas are fundamentally opposed to one’s own (and one should be free not to deal with them). All proper associations are formed or joined by individual choice and on conscious, intellectual grounds (philosophical, political, professional, etc.)—not by the physiological or geographical accident of birth, and not on the ground of tradition. When men are united by ideas, i.e., by explicit principles, there is no room for favors, whims, or arbitrary power: the principles serve as an objective criterion for determining actions and for judging men, whether leaders or members.”
― Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It

“The fundamental evil of government grants is the fact that men are forced to pay for the support of ideas diametrically opposed to their own. This is a profound violation of an individual’s integrity and conscience.”
― Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It

“There are no defenders of man’s mind—in the world’s greatest scientific-technological civilization. All that is left is a battle between the mystics of spirit and the mystics of muscle—between men guided by their feelings and men guided by their reflexes.”
― Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It

“The new “theory of justice” demands that men counteract the “injustice” of nature by instituting the most obscenely unthinkable injustice among men: deprive “those favored by nature” (i.e., the talented, the intelligent, the creative) of the right to the rewards they produce (i.e., the right to life)—and grant to the incompetent, the stupid, the slothful a right to the effortless enjoyment of the rewards they could not produce, could not imagine, and would not know what to do with.”
― Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It

“Do not hide behind such superficialities as whether you should or should not give a dime to a beggar. That is not the issue. The issue is whether you do or do not have the right to exist without giving him that dime. The issue is whether you must keep buying your life, dime by dime, from any beggar who might choose to approach you. The issue is whether the need of others is the first mortgage on your life and the moral purpose of your existence. The issue is whether man is to be regarded as a sacrificial animal. Any man of self-esteem will answer: “No.” Altruism says: “Yes.”
― Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It

“Since early childhood, their emotions have been conditioned by the tribal premise that one must “belong,” one must be “in,” one must swim with the “mainstream,” one must follow the lead of “those who know.” A man’s frustrated mind adds another emotion to the tribal conditioning: a blindly bitter resentment of his own intellectual subservience. Modern men are gregarious and antisocial at the same time. They have no inkling of what constitutes a rational human association.”
― Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It

“An emotion as such tells you nothing about reality, beyond the fact that something makes you feel something. Without a ruthlessly honest commitment to introspection—to the conceptual identification of your inner states—you will not discover what you feel, what arouses the feeling, and whether your feeling is an appropriate response to the facts of reality, or a mistaken response, or a vicious illusion produced by years of self-deception. The men who scorn or dread introspection take their inner states for granted, as an irreducible and irresistible primary, and let their emotions determine their actions. This means that they choose to act without knowing the context (reality), the causes (motives), and the consequences (goals) of their actions.”
― Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It

“Your subconscious is like a computer—more complex a computer than men can build—and its main function is the integration of your ideas. Who programs it? Your conscious mind. If you default, if you don’t reach any firm convictions, your subconscious is programmed by chance—and you deliver yourself into the power of ideas you do not know you have accepted. But one way or the other, your computer gives you print-outs, daily and hourly, in the form of emotions—which are lightning-like estimates of the things around you, calculated according to your values. If you programmed your computer by conscious thinking, you know the nature of your values and emotions. If you didn’t, you don’t.”
― Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It

“She smiled. She knew she was dying. But it did not matter any longer. She had known something which no human words could ever tell and she knew it now. She had been awaiting it and she felt it, as if it had been, as if she had lived it. Life had been, if only because she had known it could be, and she felt it now as a hymn without sound, deep under the little whole that dripped red drops into the snow, deeper than that from which the red drops came. A moment or an eternity- did it matter? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist. She smiled, her last smile, to so much that had been possible.”
― Ayn Rand, We the Living

“Because, you see, God—whatever anyone chooses to call God—is one's highest conception of the highest possible. And whoever places his highest conception above his own possibility thinks very little of himself and his life. It's a rare gift, you know, to feel reverence for your own life and to want the best, the greatest, the highest possible, here, now, for your very own. To imagine a heaven and then not to dream of it, but to demand it.”
― Ayn Rand, We the Living

“Now 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 want—isn't that life itself? And who—in this damned universe—who can tell me why I should live for anything but for that which I want?”
― Ayn Rand, We the Living

“If you write a line of zeroes, it´s still nothing.”
― Ayn Rand, We the Living

“Andrei, did you like the opera?"
"Not particularly."
"Andrei, do you see what you're missing?"
"I don't think I do, Kira. It's all rather silly. And useless."
"Can't you enjoy things that are useless, merely because they are beautiful?"
"No. But I enjoyed it."
"The music?"
"No. The way you listened to it.”
― Ayn Rand, We the Living

“I loathe your ideals because I know no worse injustice than the giving of the undeserved.”
― Ayn Rand, We the Living