Ayn Rand
"Money is the barometer of a society's virtue."
- Atlas Shrugged
"Show me your achievement - and the knowledge will give me courage for mine."
- The Fountainhead
"[I]f you wish to fight for freedom, you must begin by fighting for its unrewarded, unrecognised, unacknowledged, yet best representatives-the American businessmen."
- "America's Persecuted Minority: Big Business" in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
"…wealth is the product of man's intellect, of his creative ability, fully as much as is art, science, philosophy or any other human value."
- "The Money-Making Personality," The Objectivist Forum, Feb 1983
"Anyone who fights for the future lives in it today."
- The Romantic Manifesto
"Men have been taught that it is a virtue to agree with others. But the creator is the man who disagrees. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to swim with the current. But the creator is the man who goes against the current. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to stand together. But the creator is the man who stands alone."
- "The Soul of an Individualist," in For The New Intellectual
"Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision."
- "The Soul of an Individualist," in For The New Intellectual
"[T]he nights spent at scorching ovens in the research laboratory of the mills … the meals, interrupted and abandoned at the sudden flash of a new thought, a thought to be pursued at once, to be tried, to be tested, to be worked on for months, and to be discarded as another failure … the one thought held immovably across a span of 10 years … the thought of a metal alloy that would do more than steel had ever done … the acts of … driving himself through the wringing torture of: '… still not good enough …' and going on with no motor save the conviction that it could be done -- then the day when it was done, and its result was called Rearden Metal."
- Atlas Shrugged
"The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it's yours. But to win it requires total dedication and a total break with the world of your past, with the doctrine that man is sacrificial animal who exists for the pleasure of others. Fight for the value of your person. Fight for the virtue of your pride. Fight for the essence, which is man, for his sovereign rational mind. Fight with the radiant certainty and the absolute rectitude of knowing that yours is the morality of life and yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth."
- Atlas Shrugged
"Capitalism demands the best of every man - his rationality - and rewards him accordingly. It leaves every man free to choose the work he likes, to specialize in it, to trade his product for the products of others, and to go as far on the road of achievement as his ability and ambition will carry him."
- "For the New Intellectual," For the New Intellectual
“[The professional businessman] is the great liberator, who in the short span of a century and a half has released men from bondage to their physical needs, has released them from the terrible drudgery of an eighteen-hour workday of manual labor for their barest subsistence, has released them from famines, from pestilences, from the stagnant hopelessness and terror in which most of mankind had lived in all the pre-capitalist centuries and in which most of it still lives today in non-capitalistic countries.”
- "For the New Intellectual," For the New Intellectual
"Productive work is the central purpose of a rational man's life, the central value that integrates and determines the hierarchy of all his other values. Reason is the source, the precondition of his productive work - pride is the result."
- "The Objectivist Ethics," The Virtue of Selfishness
“We must fight for capitalism, not as a practical issue, not as an economic issue, but with the most righteous pride, as a moral issue. That is what capitalism deserves, and nothing less will save it.”
- Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
“To hold an unchanging youth is to reach at the end, the vision with which one started."
- Atlas Shrugged
"My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute."
- "About the Author," Atlas Shrugged
"In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit."
- Atlas Shrugged
"The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it."
- Atlas Shrugged