Discover Ayn Rand

“Ethics is not a mystic fantasy — nor a social convention — nor a dispensable, subjective luxury, to be switched or discarded in any emergency. Ethics is an objective, metaphysical necessity of man’s survival — not by the grace of the supernatural nor of your neighbors nor of your whims, but by the grace of reality and the nature of life.”

— Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” The Virtue of Selfishness

“Love is a response to values. It is with a person’s sense of life that one falls in love — with that essential sum, that fundamental stand or way of facing existence, which is the essence of a personality.”

“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 . . . an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in self-exaltation, only in the confidence of being desired and being worthy of desire.”

“The motive and purpose of my writing is the projection of an ideal man. The portrayal of a moral ideal, as my ultimate literary goal, as an end in itself — to which any didactic, intellectual or philosophical values contained in a novel are only the means.”