Ayn Rand Purpose Quotations

The purpose of the law is not to prevent a future offense, but to punish the one actually committed.

What is greatness? I will answer: it is the capacity to live by the three fundamental values of John Galt: reason, purpose, self-esteem.

The most depraved type of human being ... (is) the man without a purpose.

It is a policeman’s duty to retrieve stolen property and return it to its owners. But when robbery becomes the purpose of the law, and the policeman’s duty becomes, not protection, but the plunder of property - then it is an outlaw who has to become a policeman.

Peter Keating: "Do you always have to have a purpose? Do you always have to be so damn serious? Can't you ever do things without reason, just like everybody else? You're so serious, so old. Everything's important with you. Everything's great, significant in some way, every minute, even when you keep still. Can't you ever be comfortable-and unimportant?" | Howard Roark: "No."

The purpose of man's life...is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question.

In order to be in control of your life, you have to have a purpose-a productive purpose...

Dagny, we can never lose the things we live for. We may have to change their form at times, if we've made an error, but the purpose remains the same and the forms are ours to make.

He thought of all the living species that train their young in the art of survival, the cats who teach their kittens to hunt, the birds who spend such strident efforts on teaching their fledglings to fly - yet 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 ... Men would shudder, he thought, if they saw a mother bird plucking the feathers from the wings of her young, then pushing him out of the nest to struggle for survival - yet that was what they did to their children.