Galt Quotes & Sayings

He began to view writing as a petty ambition, a frivolous and indulgent whim, creativity itself as the pathology of the very young or very stupid. — Galt Niederhoffer

She stood in a swaying, sealed chamber of metal, looking at the giant generators. She had wanted to see them, because the sense of triumph within her was bound to them, to her love for them, to the reason of the life - work she had chosen. In the abnormal clarity of a violent emotion, she felt as if she were about to grasp something she had never known and had to know. She laughed aloud, but heard no sound of it; nothing could be heard through the continuous explosion. "The John Galt Line!" she shouted, for the amusement of feeling her voice swept away from her lips. — Ayn Rand

Happiness is the successful state of life, pain is an agent of death. Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values. A morality that dares to tell you to find happiness in the renunciation of your happiness - to value the failure of your values - is an insolent negation of morality. — Ayn Rand

There was no one
nothing else in the world
that had this unbelievable effect on him: thrilling electrification. But just as soon as he acknowledged this gift, he sought to destroy it. — Galt Niederhoffer

Man's life, as required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless brute, of a looting thug or a mooching mystic, but the life of a thinking being - not life by means of force or fraud, but life by means of achievement - not survival at any price, since there's only one price that pays for man's survival: reason. — Ayn Rand

I'll warn you now that there is one word which is forbidden in this valley: the word 'give. — Ayn Rand

Rivalry glued the girls together in a way that regular contact could not. — Galt Niederhoffer

There is a morality of reason, a morality proper to man, and Man's Life is its standard of value.
All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys it is the evil. — Ayn Rand

I don't think I have some special gift for knowing what's in your heart. I think we both do. — Galt Niederhoffer

You have reached the blind alley of the treason you committed when you agreed that you had no right to exist. Once, you believed it was "only a compromise": you conceded it was evil to live for yourself, but moral to live for the sake of your children. Then you conceded that it was selfish to live for your children, but moral to live for your community. Then you conceded that it was selfish to live for your community, but moral to live for your country. Now, you are letting this greatest of countries be devoured by any scum from any corner of the earth, while you concede that it is selfish to live for your country and that your moral duty is to live for the globe. — Ayn Rand

I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine. — Ayn Rand

This, in every hour and every issue, is your basic moral choice: thinking or non-thinking, existence or non-existence, A or non-A, entity or zero. — Ayn Rand

We get back our met as we measure,
We cannot do wrong and feel right,
Or can we give pain, and gain pleasure . . .
And sometimes the things our life misses,
Helps more than the thing which it gets . . .

Alice Carey — G.G. Galt

In a word, man in London is not quite so good a creature as he is out of it. — John Galt

Get the hell out of my way! Said by John Galt as the leaders of the country tried to make him become their dictator. — Ayn Rand

No space was given by the newspapers to the progress of the construction of the John Galt Line. No reporter was sent to look at the scene. The general policy of the press had been stated by a famous editor five years ago. "There are no objective facts," he had said. "Every report on facts is only somebody's opinion. It is, therefore, useless to write about facts." A — Ayn Rand

Of course I'm all right, professor. I had to be. A is A.- John Galt — Ayn Rand

From the time of the North Briton of the unprincipled Wilkes , a notion has been entertained that the moral spine in Scotland is more flexible than in England. The truth however is, that an elementary difference exists in the public feelings of the two nations quite as great as in the idioms of their respective dialects. The English are a justice-loving people, according to charter and statute; the Scotch are a wrong-resenting race, according to right and feeling: and the character of liberty among them takes its aspect from that peculiarity. — John Galt

And no one rose to ask the question: Good?-by what standard?
John Galt — Ayn Rand

She sat beside him in the car, feeling no desire to speak, knowing that neither of them could conceal the meaning of their silence. — Ayn Rand

Sweep aside those hatred-eaten mystics, who pose as friends of humanity and preach that the highest virtue man can practice is to hold his own life as of no value. Do they tell you that the purpose of morality is to curb man's instinct of self-preservation? It is for the purpose of self-preservation that man needs a code of morality. The only man who desires to be moral is the man who desires to live. — Ayn Rand

When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man. — Ragnar Galt

Reality is that which exists; the unreal does not exist; the unreal is merely that negation of existence which is the content of a human consciousness when it attempts to abandon reason. Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man's only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth. — Ayn Rand

Do not let the hero in your soul parish, in lonely frustration, for the life you deserved but never have been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won. It exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours. — Ayn Rand

And she had been in love enough times to rule out the possibility that this was merely some feat of nostalgia. — Galt Niederhoffer

Reason is your means of survival - so that for you, who are a human being, the question 'to be or not to be' is the question 'to think or not to think..'. — Ayn Rand

To think is an act of choice. The key to what you so recklessly call 'human nature,' the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness. Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct. — Ayn Rand

To the extent to which a man is rational, life is the premise directing his actions. To the extent to which he is irrational, the premise directing his actions is death. — Ayn Rand

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

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. — Ayn Rand

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

No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind that has to acquire it. — John Galt

There was something horribly depressing, she felt, about watching the weather report. That life could be planned like the perfect summer picnic drained it of spontaneity. — Galt Niederhoffer

Joy is the goal of existence, and joy is not to be stumbled upon, but to be achieved, and the act of treason is to let its vision drown in the swamp of the moment's torture. — Ayn Rand

Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies...It is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the concept of 'Value' possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil. — Ayn Rand

Assigning degrees of blame to betrayal is a difficult project, much like deciding which of two murderers has the more wicked heart. With murder, there are tangible distinctions. First degree is intentional; second degree, irresponsible; third degree, accidental. But with crimes of the heart, the distinctions are more subtle. Who is it to say when a secret turns into a sin? With a daydream, a kiss, a confession? Who is to say which transgression is worse: sexual or emotional, coveting or caressing? — Galt Niederhoffer

Through all the ages the mind has been regarded as evil, and every form of insult: from heretic to materialist to exploiter - every form of iniquity: from exile to disfranchisement to expropriation - every form of torture: from sneers to rack to firing squad - have been brought down upon those who assumed the responsibility of looking at the world through the eyes of a living consciousness and performing the crucial act of a rational connection. Yet only to the extent to which - in chains, in dungeons, in hidden corners, in the cells of philosophers, in the shops of traders - some men continued to think, only to that extent was humanity able to survive. — Ayn Rand

A process of reason is a process of constant choice in answer to the question: True or False? - Right or Wrong? — Ayn Rand

Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification. — Ayn Rand

They have taught man that he is a hopeless misfit made of two elements, both symbols of death. A body without a soul is a corpse, a soul without a body is a ghost- yet such is their image of man's nature: the battleground of a struggle between a corpse and a ghost, (john Galt) — Ayn Rand

I will stop the motor of the world. — John Galt

Since life requires a specific course of action, any other course will destroy it. A being who does not hold his own life as the motive and goal of his actions, is acting on the motive and standard of death. — Ayn Rand

Are you seeking to know what is wrong with the world? All the disasters that have wrecked your world, came from your leaders' attempt to evade the fact that A is A. All the secret evil you dread to face within you and all the pain you have ever endured, came from your own attempt to evade the fact that A is A. — Ayn Rand

Their looks and personalities were still intact, but some thing had atrophied ever so slightly. Their faces bore the distinct wear of goals gone too long unfulfilled. — Galt Niederhoffer

Evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from us. — John Galt

John Galt spent years looking for it. He crossed oceans, and he crossed deserts, and he went down into forgotten mines, miles under the earth. But he found it on the top of a mountain. It took him ten years to climb that mountain. It broke every bone in his body, it tore the skin off his hands, it made him lose his home, his name, his love. But he climbed it. He found the fountain of youth, which he wanted to bring down to men.Only he never came back. — Ayn Rand

I think, therefore I'll think. — Ayn Rand

It was a sudden, stunned state of quiet drunkenness, complete in itself, their hair mingled like the rays of two bodies in space that had achieved their meeting, she saw that he walked with his eyes closed, as if even sight would now be an intrusion. — Ayn Rand

Physical attraction did its part to glue them together, but something stronger than sexual attraction sealed the bond. When men and women grow apart, it is for the same reason they are drawn together; because they are finally, inherently too different. Friendships among women, on the other hand, were burdened by similarity. — Galt Niederhoffer

Above all, don't overestimate your own power as an individual. Founders are important not because they are the only ones whose work has value, but rather because a great founder can bring out the best work from everybody at his company. That we need individual founders in all their peculiarity does not mean that we are called to worship Ayn Randian "prime movers" who claim to be independent of everybody around them. In this respect Rand was a merely half-great writer: her villains were real, but her heroes were fake. There is no Galt's Gulch. There is no secession from society. To believe yourself invested with divine self-sufficiency is not the mark of a strong individual, but of a person who has mistaken the crowd's worship - or jeering - for the truth. The single greatest danger for a founder is to become so certain of his own myth that he loses his mind. But an equally insidious danger for every business is to lose all sense of myth and mistake disenchantment for wisdom. — Anonymous

If anything was, that the world will always
it can only
disappoint. — Galt Niederhoffer

She's a writer. The kind of writer who wouldn't be published outside. She believes that when one deals with words, one deals with the mind. — Ayn Rand

A trader is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved. — John Galt

Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice - and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man - by choice; he has to hold his life as a value - by choice; he has to learn to sustain it - by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues - by choice.
A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality. — Ayn Rand

In the middle column, the colony ships she and her fleet had taken: the Bedyadat Jadida, out of Luna. The John Galt and the Mark Watney, out of Mars. The — James S.A. Corey

The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments. — Ayn Rand

An attempt to gain a value by deceiving the mind of others is an act of raising your victims to a position higher than reality. — John Galt

To exist is to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of non-existence, it is to be an entity of a specific nature made of specific attributes. — Ayn Rand

Love and hysteria are easily mistaken. — Galt Niederhoffer

Government power is always abused by seizing and perverting the law. And with few exceptions, government always determines what is law. — John Galt

Make no mistake about the character of mystics. To undercut your consciousness has always been their only purpose throughout the ages - and power, the power to rule you by force, has always been their only lust (John Galt) — Ayn Rand

Who is John Galt? — Ayn Rand

Whenever a man denounces the mind, it is because his goal is of a nature the mind would not permit him to confess. — Ayn Rand

I don't know. But I've watched them here for twenty years and I've seen the change. They used to rush through here, and it was wonderful to watch, it was the hurry of men who knew where they were going and were eager to get there. Now they're hurrying because they are afraid. It's not a purpose that drives them, it's fear. They're not going anywhere, they're escaping. And I don't think they know what it is that they want to escape. They don't look at one another. They jerk when brushed against. They smile too much, but it's an ugly kind of smiling: it's not joy, it's pleading. I don't know what it is that's happening to the world." He shrugged. "Oh, well, who is John Galt? — Ayn Rand

Man's life is the standard of morality, but your own life is its purpose . If existence on earth is your goal, you must choose your actions and values by the standard of that which is proper to man - for the purpose of preserving, fulfilling and enjoying the irreplaceable value which is your life. — Ayn Rand

Occasionally, she wondered if all couples struggled so much to understand one another, spoke so little at dinner together, spent so much time camped out in front of the TV. Did all women sometimes feel distanced from their man while they were making love? — Galt Niederhoffer

She felt an odd, light-hearted indifference, as if she suddenly wanted nothing but the comfort of surrendering to helplessness. — Ayn Rand

Every form of causeless self-doubt, every feeling of inferiority and secret unworthiness is, in fact, man's hidden dread of his inability to deal with existence. — John Galt

It only stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master. — Ayn Rand

Do not cry that it is our duty to serve you. We do not recognize such duty. Do not cry that you need us. We do not consider need a claim. Do not cry that you own us. You don't. — Ayn Rand

Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality. But existence exists; reality is not to be wiped out, it will merely wipe out the wiper. By refusing to say 'It is,' you are refusing to say 'I am.' By suspending your judgment, you are negating your person. When a man declares: 'Who am I to know?'- he is declaring: 'Who am I to live? — Ayn Rand

The cloven-foot of self-interest was now and then to be seen aneath the robe of public principle. — John Galt

If any part of your uncertainty is a conflict between your heart and your mind - follow your mind. — Ayn Rand

John, the self-made man, self-made in every sense, out of nowhere, penniless, parentless, tie-less ... but I've always thought of him as if he had come into the world like Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, who sprang forth from Jupiter's head, fully grown and fully armed. — Ayn Rand

If there are degrees of evil, it is hard to say who is more contemptible: the brute who assumes the right to force the mind of others or the moral degenerate who grants to others the right to force his mind. — John Galt

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. We do not seek to force our code upon them. They are free to believe what they please. — Ayn Rand

Yes, this is an age of moral crisis. Yes, you are bearing punishment for your evil. But it is not man who is now on trial and it is not human nature that will take the blame. It is your moral code that's through, this time. Your moral code has reached its climax, the blind alley at the end of its course. And if you wish to go on living, what you now need is not to return to morality - you who have never known any - but to discover it. — Ayn Rand

It was understood that they shared the same thresholds
the same inexhaustible appetite for wasting time, for discussing lofty ideas, for dissecting trivial things, for driving to nowhere in particular, for listening to music, for talking about books, for obsessing over pop culture, but mostly for laughing, talking, and simply being together. There was nothing one could say that the other would find too cruel or too kind. And on those rare occasions when they did tire of each other, they needed only go a day without talking before they yearned to reconnect. — Galt Niederhoffer

The state of being lost, he seemed to imply, granted him a kind of freedom. — Galt Niederhoffer

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. — Ayn Rand

He stepped to the window and pointed to the skyscrapers of the city. He said that we had to extinguish the lights of the world, and when we would see the lights of New York go out, we would know that our job was done. — Ayn Rand

It was that ruthless tone, peculiarly his, which sounded implacable by being simple, devoid of any emotional value, save the quality of respect for facts. — Ayn Rand

If enjoyment is a value, why is it moral when experienced by others, but immoral when experienced by you? ... Why is it immoral for your to desire, but moral for others to do so? Why is it immoral to produce a value and keep it, but moral to give it away? — John Galt

There is no conflict, and no call for sacrifice, and no man is a threat to the aims of another - if men understand that reality is an absolute not to be faked, that lies do not work, that the unearned cannot be had, that the undeserved cannot be given, that the destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn't. — Ayn Rand

The anti-mind is the anti-life. — Ayn Rand

The self you have betrayed is your mind; self-esteem is reliance on one's power to think. The ego you seek, that essential "you" which you cannot express or define, is not your emotions or inarticulate dreams, but your intellect, that judge of your supreme tribunal whom you've impeached in order to drift at the mercy of any stray shyster you describe as your "feeling." — John Galt

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. — Ayn Rand

A trader does not squander his body as fodder or his soul as alms. — John Galt

Not to speak would have infused the moment with more meaning than it deserved. — Galt Niederhoffer

Technically, on the spectrum of very bad things, they did nothing truly wicked. But of course, that spectrum has no measure for the greatest of all carnal sins, the kind that occurs before skin touches skin, before wondering turns to yearning, yearning to having, having to holding for dear life, when two people cling to each other so desperately that even when they lie, inches apart, neither is fully satisfied until the light between them turns to darkness. — Galt Niederhoffer

No one's happiness but my own is in my power to achieve or to destroy. — Ayn Rand

I am the man who loves his life. I am the man who does not sacrifice his love or his values. — Ayn Rand

Time passed at an accelerated pace. They could be sitting in traffic or talking on the phone or waiting in line for a movie, and their time felt precious, important, worthwhile. — Galt Niederhoffer

Who is John Galt?"
The light was ebbing, and Eddie Willers could not distinguish the bum's face. The bum had said it simply, without expression. But from the sunset far at the end of the street, yellow glints caught his eyes, and the eyes looked straight at Eddie Willers, mocking and still - as if the question had been addressed to the causeless uneasiness within him.
"Why did you say that?" asked Eddie Willers, his voice tense.
The bum leaned against the side of the doorway; a wedge of broken glass behind him reflected the metal yellow of the sky.
"Why does it bother you?" he asked.
"It doesn't," snapped Eddie Willers. — Ayn Rand

Was it possible there was some fatal flaw in their matching, that they were ultimately, impossibly different
dissimilar enough to fall in love, but too fundamentally distinct to stay together? — Galt Niederhoffer

There is no conflict of interests among men, neither in business nor in trade nor in their most personal desires - if they omit the irrational from their view of the possible and destruction from their view of the practical? — Ayn Rand

It was as if he were a single whole, grasped by her first glance at him, like some irreducible absolute, like an axiom not to be explained any further, as if she knew everything about him by direct perception, and what awaited her now was only the process of identifying her knowledge. — Ayn Rand

Your mind is your only judge of truth-and if others dissent from your verdict, reality is the court of final appeal. — John Galt

There can be no causeless love or any sort of causeless emotion. An emotion is a response to a fact of reality, an estimate dictated by your standards. — John Galt

The reporters who came to the press conference in the
office of the John Galt Line were young men who had
been trained to think that their job consisted of
concealing from the world the nature of its events.
It was their daily duty to serve as audience for some
public figure who made utterances about the public good,
in phrases carefully chosen to convey no meaning.
It was their daily job to sling words together in any
combination they pleased, so long as the words did not
fall into a sequence saying something specific.
They could not understand the interview now being
given to them. — Ayn Rand