Rearden Quotes & Sayings

He stood looking at her as if it took all of his effort to keep his eyes directed at her face, to keep seeing her, to endure the sight. "What do you want?" he asked. — Ayn Rand

He was seeing the full extent of her failure - in the immensity of his own indifference. The droning stream of her insults was like the sound of a distant riveting machine, a long, impotent pressure that reached nothing within him. — Ayn Rand

I am in full agreement with the facts of everything said about me in the newspapers - with the facts, but not with the evaluation. — Ayn Rand

On't worry about the goddamn bastards. The two words sounded shockingly violent, because his face and voice remained calm. — Ayn Rand

When he did not smile, his face looked inanimate, only his eyes remained alive, active with a cold, brilliant clarity of perception. — Ayn Rand

They want us to pretend that we see the world as they pretend they see it. They need some sort of sanction from us. — Ayn Rand

He saw, on their faces, that stubbornly evasive look ... the look of a man cheating himself of his own consciousness. — Ayn Rand

Throughout his life, whenever he became convinced that a course of action was right, the desire to follow it had come automatically. — Ayn Rand

He had acquired the conviction that one had to concern oneself with the rational, not the insane - that one had to seek that which was right, because the right answer always won - that the senseless, the wrong, the monstrously unjust could not work, could not succeed, could do nothing but defeat itself. — Ayn Rand

Her plain gray suit was like a thin coating of metal over a slender body against the spread of sun-flooded space and sky. Her posture had the lightness and unselfconscious precision of an arrogantly pure self-confidence. She was watching the work, her glance intent and purposeful, the glance of competence enjoying its own function. She looked as if this were her place, her moment and her world, she looked as if enjoyment were her natural state, her face was the living form of an active, living intelligence ... — Ayn Rand

He walked with an effortless speed, feeling relaxed by a form of activity that was natural to him. — Ayn Rand

But don't I have any freedom of speech?"
"In your own house. Not in mine."
"Don't I have a right to my own ideas?"
"At your own expense. Not at mine."
"Don't you tolerate any differences of opinion?"
"Not when I'm paying the bills. — Ayn Rand

You always play it open, don't you?" he asked.
"I've never noticed you doing otherwise."
"I thought I was the only one who could afford to. — Ayn Rand

They had counted on his pity and dreaded his anger; they had not dared consider the third alternative: his indifference. — Ayn Rand

He did not know that he was expected to attempt to buy his way into society and that they anticipated the pleasure of rejecting him. He had no time to notice their disappointment. — Ayn Rand

Vision (know what you want)
Passion (know why you want it)
Commitment (know how you're going to get there) — Renee Rearden

He had never known fear because, against any disaster, he had held the omnipotent cure of being able to act. — Ayn Rand

He, the man of violent energy and passionate ambition, the man of achievement, lighted by the flame of his success and flung into the midst of those pretentious ashes who called themselves an intellectual elite, the burned-out remnants of undigested culture, feeding on the afterglow of the minds of others, offering their denial of the mind as their only claim to distinction, and a craving to control the world as their only lust ... — Ayn Rand

All your life, you have heard yourself denounced, not for your faults, but for your greatest virtues. You have been hated, not for your mistakes, but for your achievements. You have been scorned for all those qualities of character which are your highest pride. You have been called selfish for the courage of acting on your own judgment 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 called anti-social for the vision that made you venture upon undiscovered roads. You have been called ruthless for the strength and self-discipline of your drive to your purpose. You have been called greedy for the magnificence of your power to create wealth. — Ayn Rand

Don't tell me your evaluation. Give me the facts. — Ayn Rand

Dagny leaned back in her chair. The short sentence was a shock. It was not merely relief: it was the sudden realization that nothing else was necessary to guarantee that it would be done; she needed no proofs, no questions, no explanations; a complex problem could rest safely on three syllables pronounced by a man who knew what he was saying. — Ayn Rand

He saw the tension of the face, the speed of the walk, the drunken exhilaration of the body, drunk on the energy of sleepless nights, the proud lift of the head, the clear, steady, ruthless eyes, the eyes of a man who drove himself without pity toward that which he wanted. — Ayn Rand

Man, whose tool of survival is the mind, does not merely fail to teach a child to think, but devotes the child's education to the purpose of destroying his brain, of convincing him that thought is futile and evil, before he has started to think. — Ayn Rand

Wondering how one went about forcing one's mind into blankness, particularly after a lifetime lived on the axiom that the constant, clearest, most ruthless function of his rational faculty was his foremost duty. — Ayn Rand

There was no guilt in his face, no doubt, nothing but the calm of an inviolate self-confidence. — Ayn Rand

Rearden sat in his room at the Wayne-Falkland Hotel, fighting an enemy more dangerous than weariness or fear: revulsion against the thought of having to deal with human beings. — Ayn Rand

It was his self-esteem she had sought to destroy, knowing that a man who surrenders his value is at the mercy of anyone's will; it was his moral purity she had struggled to breach, it was his confident rectitude she had wanted to shatter by means of the poison of guilt - as if, were he to collapse, his depravity would give her a right to hers. — Ayn Rand

Don't try it."
"What?"
"To win any battle when I set the terms."
She did not answer. She was struck by what the words made her feel; it was not an emotion, but a physical sensation of pleasure ... — Ayn Rand

He led her to the bedroom, he took off her clothes, without a word, in the manner of an owner undressing a person whose consent is not required. He clasped the pendant on her shoulders. She stood naked, the stone between her breasts, like a sparkling drop of blood. — Ayn Rand

If you believe that you have the right to force me - use your guns openly. I will not help you to disguise the nature of your action. — Ayn Rand

The faces of the others looked like aggregates of interchangeable features, every face oozing to blend into the anonymity of resembling all, and all looking as if they were melting. Rearden's face, with the sharp planes, the pale blue eyes, the ash-blond hair, had the firmness of ice; the uncompromising clarity of its lines made it look, among the others, as if he were moving through a fog, hit by a ray of light. — Ayn Rand

The evaluation of an action as 'practical,' depends on what it is that one wishes to practice. — Ayn Rand

Life ... had been defined as motion; man's life was purposeful motion; what was the state of a being to whom purpose and motion were denied, a being held in chains but left to breathe and to see all the magnificence of the possibilities he could have reached, left to scream "Why?" and to be shown the muzzle of a gun as sole explanation? — Ayn Rand

What are you laughing at?"
"It's wonderful."
"What?"
"The way you don't react as everybody else does nowadays. — Ayn Rand

I will not help you to pretend that I have a chance. I will not help you to preserve an appearance of righteousness where rights are not recognized. I will not help you to preserve an appearance of rationality by entering a debate in which a gun is the final argument. I will not help you to pretend that you are administering justice. — Ayn Rand

Thought - he told himself quietly - is a weapon one uses in order to act. No action was possible. Thought is the tool by which one makes a choice. No choice was left to him. Thought sets one's purpose and the way to reach it. In the matter of his life being torn piece by piece out of him, he was to have no voice, no purpose, no way, no defense. — Ayn Rand

People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I've learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one's reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one's master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person's view requires to be faked ... The man who lies to the world, is the world's slave from then on ... There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all. — Ayn Rand

Do I strike you as a man with a miserable inferiority complex?"
"Good God, no!"
"Only that kind of man spends his life running after women. — Ayn Rand

There was still one response, the greatest, that she had missed. She thought: To find a feeling that would hold, as their sum, as their final expression, the purpose of all the things she loved on earth ... To find a consciousness like her own, who would be the meaning of her world, as she would be of his ... No, not Francisco d'Anconia, not Hank Rearden, not any man she had ever met or admired ... A man who existed only in her knowledge of her capacity for an emotion she had never felt, but would have given her life to experience. — Ayn Rand

Nothing can justify injustice. — Ayn Rand

Rearden. He didn't invent smelting and chemistry and air compression. He couldn't have invented his Metal but for thousands and thousands of other people. His Metal! Why does he think it's his? Why does he think it's his invention? Everybody uses the work of everybody else. Nobody ever invents anything. — Ayn Rand

This was the simple essence of his universe: the instantaneous refusal to submit to disaster, the irresistible drive to fight it, the triumphant feeling of his own ability to win. — Ayn Rand

The human shapes moving past him in the streets of the city were physical objects without any meaning. — Ayn Rand

She thought suddenly that she was wrong about his lack of emotion: the hidden undertone of his manner was enjoyment. She realized that she had always felt a sense of light-hearted relaxation in his presence and known that he shared it. He was the only man she knew to whom she could speak without strain or effort. This, she thought, was a mind she respected, an adversary worth matching. — Ayn Rand

The justice which would forgive miles of innocent errors of knowledge, would not forgive a single step taken in conscious evil. — Ayn Rand

I refuse to apologize for my ability - I refuse to apologize for my success - I refuse to apologize for my money. — Ayn Rand

He saw the article ... which was not an expression of ideas, but a bucket of slime emptied in public - an article that did not contain a single fact, not even an invented one, but poured a stream of sneers and adjectives in which nothing was clear except the filthy malice of denouncing without considering proof necessary. — Ayn Rand

You take pride in setting no limit to your endurance, Mr. Rearden, because you think that you are doing right. What if you aren't? What if you're placing your virtue in the service of evil and letting it become a tool for the destruction of everything you love, respect and admire? Why don't you uphold your own code of values among men as you do among iron smelters? You who won't allow one per cent of impurity into an alloy of metal - what have you allowed into your moral code? — Ayn Rand

Mr. Rearden," said Francisco, his voice solemnly calm, "if you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down on his shoulders - what would you tell him to do?" "I ... don't know. What ... could he do? What would you tell him? — Ayn Rand

I like to deal with somebody who has no illusions about getting favors. — Ayn Rand

There are no evil thoughts, Mr. Rearden," Francisco said softly, "except one: the refusal to think. — Ayn Rand

If, to him, love was a celebration of one's self and of existence - then, to the self-haters and life-haters, the pursuit of destruction was the only form and equivalent of love. — Ayn Rand

When you violate the rights of one man, you have violated the rights of all, and a public of rightless creatures is doomed to destruction. — Ayn Rand

Such was the code that the world had accepted and such was the key to the code: that it hooked man's love of existence to a circuit of torture, so that only the man who had nothing to offer would have nothing to fear, so that the virtues which made life possible and the values which gave it meaning became the agents of its destruction, so that one's best became the tool of one's agony, and man's life on earth became impractical. — Ayn Rand

Ferris: Are you going to be as impractical as that? Rearden: The evaluation of an action as practical, Dr. Ferris, depends on what it is that one wishes to practice. Ferris: Haven't you always placed your self-interest above all else? Rearden: That is what I am doing right now. — Ayn Rand

The road was dark, edged with trees. Looking up, he could see a few leaves against the stars; the leaves were twisted and dry, ready to fall. There were distant lights in the windows of houses scattered through the countryside; but the lights made the road seem lonelier.
He never felt loneliness except when he was happy. — Ayn Rand

If you intend to keep your word, don't talk about it, just do it. — Ayn Rand

Watching Larkin's efforts, Rearden felt what he did when he watched an ant struggling under the load of a matchstick. It's so hard for him, thought Rearden, and so easy for me. — Ayn Rand

We lived by that which we held to be good and punished that which we held to be evil. You live by that which you denounce as evil and punish that which you know to be good. — Ayn Rand

He knew that the conference was a trap; he knew also that he was walking into it with nothing for any trappers to gain. — Ayn Rand

There's no way to make the irrational work. — Ayn Rand

The action of naming an issue instead of evading it, was so unlike the usual behavior of all the men he knew, it was such a sudden, startling relief ... — Ayn Rand

will, when he gets here. But, boy! - I'd work for him as a cinder sweeper. He'd blast through this valley like a rocket. He'd triple everybody's production." "Who's that?" "Hank Rearden. — Ayn Rand

Dagny, why is it that most women would never admit that, but you do?"
"Because they're never sure that they ought to be wanted. I am."
"I do admire self-confidence."
"Self-confidence was only one part of what I said, Hank."
"What's the whole?"
"Confidence of my value - and yours. — Ayn Rand