#shrugged

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged . One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs. ↗

— John Rogers

#ayn-rand #jrr-tolkien #lord-of-the-rings #change

You have been called selfish for the courage of acting on your own judgement and bearing sole responsibility for your own life. You have been called arrogant for your independent mind. You have been called cruel for your unyielding integrity. You have been calle anti social for the vision that made you venture upon undiscovered roads. ↗

— Ayn Rand

#courage

Indifference to me, is the epitome of all evil. ↗

— Elie Wiesel

#ayn-rand #evil #evil-men #objectivism #psychopathic-personalities

Never think of pain or danger or enemies a moment longer than is necessary to fight them. ↗

— Ayn Rand

#enemy

Do you know the hallmark of a second rater? It's resentment of another man's achievement. Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own - they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal - for a mind to respect and an achievement to admire. They bare their teeth at you from out of their rat holes,thinking that you take pleasure in letting your brilliance dim them - while you'd give a year of my life to see a flicker of talent anywhere among them. They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear. They have no way of knowing what he feels when surrounded by inferiors - hatred? no, not hatred, but boredom - the terrible, hopeless, draining, paralyzing boredom. Of what account are praise and adulation from men whom you don't respect? Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?" "I've felt it all my life," she said. ↗

— Ayn Rand

#atlas-shrugged #inspirational #mediocrity #objectivism #second-handers

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

— Ayn Rand

#admiration #atlas-shrugged #inspirational #love #objectivism

We are on strike against martyrdom—and against the moral code that demands it. We are on strike against those who believe that one man must exist for the sake of another. We are on strike against the morality of cannibals, be it practiced in body or in spirit. We will not deal with men on any terms but ours—and our terms are a moral code which holds that man is an end in himself and not the means to any end of others. ↗

— Ayn Rand

#ayn-rand #individualism #objectivism #rational-egoism #men

He was described as the literary leader of the age, but had never written a book that sold more than three thousand copies. ↗

— Ayn Rand

#age

Your fear of death is not a love for life. . . ↗

— Ayn Rand

#death

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. ↗

— Ayn Rand

#ayn-rand #galt #objectivism #philosophy #taggart