The Right to the Pursuit of Happiness means your right to live for yourself, to choose what constitutes your own private, personal, individual happiness and to work for its achievement, so long as you respect the same right in others.
It means that you cannot be forced to devote your life to the happiness of another person nor of any number of other people.
It means that the collective cannot decide what is to be the purpose of an individual's existence nor prescribe anyone's choice of happiness.
- 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.
A doctrine that gives you, as an ideal, the role of a sacrificial animal seeking slaughter on the altars of others,
is giving you death as your standard.
By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man/woman—every person—is an end in him/herself, he/she exists for his/her own sake, and the achievement of his/her own happiness is the highest moral purpose.
But neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims.
Just as person is free to attempt to survive in any random manner, but will perish unless he/she lives as his/her nature requires, so he/she is free to seek happiness in any mindless fraud, but the torture of frustration is all he/she will find, unless he/she seeks the happiness proper to the individual.
The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live, rationally
Ayn Rand : For the New Intellectual
