#objectivism

"We are born into this world unarmed - our mind is our only weapon."

"Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?"

"Devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality; there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking."

"A photograph shouldn't be just a picture, it should be a philosophy."

"Who is John Galt?"

"Those who make conversations impossible, make escalation inevitable."

"I never found beauty in longing for the impossible and never found the possible to be beyond my reach."

"I think, therefore I'll think."

"I take no pride in hopeless longing; I wouldn't hold a stillborn aspiration. I'd want to have it, to make it, to live it."

"I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle."

"In meetings philosophy might work,on the field practicality works."

"Man is an end in himself."

"Every form of happiness if one, every desire is driven by the same motor--by our love for a single value, for the highest potentiality of our own existence--and every achievement is an expression of it."

"The view that man was ever to be drawn by some vision of the unattainable shining ahead, doomed ever to aspire, but not to achieve, my life and my values could not bring me to that."

"To sum it all up, the [Ayn] Rand belief system looks like this:1. Facts are facts: things can be absolutely right or absolutely wrong, as determined by reason.2. According to my reasoning, I am absolutely right.3. Charity is immoral.4. Pay for your own fucking schools."

"I do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and I do not live in chronic dread of disaster. It is no happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that I regard as the abnormal exception in Human Life."