{"quotes":[{"text":"Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?","author":"Ayn Rand","tags":["achievement","admiration","atlas-shrugged","inspirational","love","objectivism"],"id":4179,"author_id":"Ayn+Rand"},{"text":"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.","author":"Ayn Rand","tags":["achievement","atlas-shrugged","inspirational","mediocrity","objectivism","second-handers"],"id":10463,"author_id":"Ayn+Rand"},{"text":"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.","author":"Ayn Rand","tags":["atlas-shrugged","evil","good","john-galt","life","man","mind","morality","morals","objectivism","philosophy","pursuit-of-happiness","reason","think","thinking","values","virtue"],"id":24621,"author_id":"Ayn+Rand"},{"text":"They said you were hard and cold and unfeeling.”“But it’s true...I am, in the sense they mean—only have they ever told you in just what sense they mean it?'What did they mean about you?”“Whenever anyone accuses some person of being ‘unfeeling,’ he means that that person is just. He means that that person has no causeless emotions and will not grant him a feeling which he does not deserve. He means that .‘to feel’ is to go against reason, against moral values, against reality.","author":"Ayn Rand","tags":["atlas-shrugged","cold","dagny-taggart","emotions","feel","reason","unemotional"],"id":31665,"author_id":"Ayn+Rand"},{"text":"It does take an exceptional mind and a still more exceptional integrity to remain untouched by the brain-destroying influences of the world’s doctrines, the accumulated evil of centuries—to remain human, since the human is the rational.","author":"Ayn Rand","tags":["atlas-shrugged","human","integrity","mind"],"id":32729,"author_id":"Ayn+Rand"},{"text":"They say that it’s hard for men to agree. You’d be surprised how easy it is—when both parties hold as their moral absolute that neither exists for the sake of the other and that reason is their only means of trade.","author":"Ayn Rand","tags":["agree","atlas-shrugged","moral","reason"],"id":32882,"author_id":"Ayn+Rand"},{"text":"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.","author":"Ayn Rand","tags":["atlas-shrugged","john-galt","lies","reality","value"],"id":32912,"author_id":"Ayn+Rand"},{"text":"It’s not that I don’t suffer, it’s that I know the unimportance of suffering, I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one’s soul and as a permanent scar across one’s view of existence.","author":"Ayn Rand","tags":["atlas-shrugged","john-galt","pain","suffering"],"id":38498,"author_id":"Ayn+Rand"},{"text":"Señor d.‘Anconia, what do you think is going to happen to the world?”“Just exactly what it deserves.”“Oh, how cruel!”“Don’t you believe in the operation of the moral law, madame?” Francisco asked gravely. “I do.","author":"Ayn Rand","tags":["atlas-shrugged","francisco-d-anconia","world"],"id":42883,"author_id":"Ayn+Rand"},{"text":"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.","author":"Ayn Rand","tags":["atlas-shrugged","hank-rearden","mind"],"id":44156,"author_id":"Ayn+Rand"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":108,"pages":11,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}