“We often miss opportunity because it's dressed in overalls and looks like work”

“I have friends in overalls whose friendship I would not swap for the favor of the kings of the world.”

“Nature is what we know. We do not know the gods of religions. And nature is not kind, or merciful, or loving. If God made me the fabled God of the three qualities of which I spoke: mercy, kindness...”

“I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.”

“Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

“When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this - you haven't.”

“Dagny," he said, looking at the city as it moved past their taxi window, "think of the first man who thought of making a steel girder. He knew what he saw, what he thought and what he wanted. He di...”

“Our civilization is not Christian. It does not come from the skies. It is not a result of "inspiration." It is the child of invention, of discovery, of applied knowledge -- that is to say, of scien...”

“The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”

“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettie...”

“To know the history of science is to recognize the mortality of any claim to universal truth. ”

“The scientist only imposes two things, namely truth and sincerity, imposes them upon himself and upon other scientists.”