214 quotes found
“It seemed natural; natural to the moment’s peculiar reality that was sharply clear, but cut off from everything, immediate, but disconnected, like a bright island in a wall of fog, the heightened, ...”
“It was as if a volcano were cracking open, yet the people at the foot of the mountain ignored the sudden fissures, the black fumes, the boiling trickles, and went on believing that their only dange...”
“Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life. Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself.”
“We are those who do not disconnect the values of their minds from the actions of their bodies, those who do not leave their values to empty dreams, but bring them into existence, those who give mat...”
“The man who is convinced of his own worthlessness will be drawn to a woman he despises—because she will reflect his own secret self, she will release him from that objective reality in which he is ...”
“Observe the ugly mess which most men make of their sex lives—and observe the mess of contradictions which they hold as their moral philosophy.”
“No matter what corruption he’s taught about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which he cannot perform for any motive but his own enjoyment—just try ...”
“The man who despises himself tries to gain self-esteem from sexual adventures —which can’t be done, because sex is not the cause, but an effect and an expression of a man’s sense of his own value.”
“What glory can there be in the conquest of a mindless body?”
“Sex is the physical expression of a tribute to personal values.”
“She knew the general doctrine on sex, held by people in one form or another, the doctrine that sex was an ugly weakness of man’s lower nature, to be condoned regretfully. She experienced an emotion...”
“Isn’t it wonderful that our bodies can give us so much pleasure?” he said to her once, quite simply. They were happy and radiantly innocent. They were both incapable of the conception that joy is sin.”
“The statue was of a young man with a tall, gaunt body and an angular face. He held his head as if he faced a challenge and found joy in his capacity to meet it.”
“He did not know that he was expected to attempt to buy his way into society and that they anticipated the pleasure of rejecting him. He had no time to notice their disappointment.”
“...there can be no justification for a society in which a man is expected to manufacture the weapons for his own murderers.”
“Dagny leaned back in her chair. The short sentence was a shock. It was not merely relief: it was the sudden realization that nothing else was necessary to guarantee that it would be done; she neede...”
“What’s wealth but the means of expanding one’s life? There’s two ways one can do it: either by producing more or by producing it faster.”
“If, to him, love was a celebration of one’s self and of existence—then, to the self-haters and life-haters, the pursuit of destruction was the only form and equivalent of love.”
“It was his self-esteem she had sought to destroy, knowing that a man who surrenders his value is at the mercy of anyone’s will; it was his moral purity she had struggled to breach, it was his confi...”
“She had set out to break him, as if, unable to equal his value, she could surpass it by destroying it, as if the measure of his greatness would thus become the measure of hers, as if the vandal who...”
