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Quotes by Ayn Rand


If you don't know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn.
– Ayn Rand
A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.
– Ayn Rand
A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.
– Ayn Rand
A desire presupposes the possibility of action to achieve it; action presupposes a goal which is worth achieving.
– Ayn Rand
Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values.
– Ayn Rand
Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.
– Ayn Rand
Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
– Ayn Rand
Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.
– Ayn Rand
Do not ever say that the desire to do good by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.
– Ayn Rand
Every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics - a rational ethics - as a precondition of rebirth.
– Ayn Rand
Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice.
– Ayn Rand
Evil requires the sanction of the victim.
– Ayn Rand
Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins.
– Ayn Rand
God... a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive.
– Ayn Rand
Government help to business is just as disastrous as government persecution... the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off.
– Ayn Rand
He had a big head and a face so ugly it became almost fascinating.
– Ayn Rand
He liked to observe emotions; they were like red lanterns strung along the dark unknown of another's personality, marking vulnerable points.
– Ayn Rand
I don't build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.
– 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
If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.
– Ayn Rand
If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose... the fact that they were the people who created the phrase to make money. No other language or nation had ever used these words before... Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created.
– Ayn Rand
Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).
– Ayn Rand
Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.
– Ayn Rand
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
Just as man can't exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one's rights into reality, to think, to work and keep the results, which means: the right of property.
– Ayn Rand
Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.
– Ayn Rand
Man is a being with free will; therefore, each man is potentially good or evil, and it's up to him and only him (through his reasoning mind) to decide which he wants to be.
– Ayn Rand
Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.
– Ayn Rand
Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth, the man who would make his fortune no matter where he started.
– Ayn Rand
Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone.
– Ayn Rand
Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter.
– Ayn Rand
The ladder of success is best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity.
– Ayn Rand
The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap.
– Ayn Rand
The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.
– Ayn Rand
The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.
– Ayn Rand
The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me.
– Ayn Rand
There can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions to an individual, but permitted to a mob.
– Ayn Rand
There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.
– Ayn Rand
They proclaim that every man is entitled to exist without labor and, the laws of reality to the contrary notwithstanding, is entitled to receive his minimum sustenance his food, his clothes, his shelter, with no effort on his part, as his due and his birthright. To receive it, from whom?
– Ayn Rand
Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision.
– Ayn Rand
To achieve, you need thought. You have to know what you are doing and that's real power.
– Ayn Rand
To say I love you one must first be able to say the I.
– Ayn Rand
Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future.
– Ayn Rand
We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.
– Ayn Rand
What is a demanding pleasure that demands the use of ones mind! Not in the sense of problem solving, but in the sense of exercising discrimination, judgment, awareness.
– Ayn Rand
When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit.
– Ayn Rand
When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is learning to understand and control the behavior of crop plants and domestic animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized.
– Ayn Rand
A chronic lack of pleasure, of any enjoyable, rewarding or stimulating experiences, produces a slow, gradual, day-by-day erosion of man's emotional vitality, which he may ignore or repress, but which is recorded by the relentless computer of his subconscious mechanism that registers an ebbing flow, then a trickle, then a few last drops of fuel--until the day when his inner motor stops and he wonders desperately why he has no desire to go on, unable to find any definable cause of his hopeless, chronic sense of exhaustion.
– Ayn Rand
Guilt is a rope that wears thin.
– Ayn Rand
Thanksgiving is a typically American holiday...The lavish meal is a symbol of the fact that abundant consumption is the result and reward of production.
– Ayn Rand
I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.
– Ayn Rand
Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man’s values, it has to be earned.
– Ayn Rand
Rationality is the recognition of the fact that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it.
– Ayn Rand
That which you call your soul or spirit is your conciousness, and that which you call 'free will' is your mind's freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character.
– Ayn Rand
It is not advisable, James, to venture unsolicited opinions. You should spare yourself the embarrassing discovery of their exact value to your listener.
– Ayn Rand
The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it.
– Ayn Rand
The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.
– Ayn Rand
The Argument from Intimidation is a confession of intellectual impotence.
– Ayn Rand
When I die, I hope to go to Heaven, whatever the Hell that is.
– Ayn Rand
The truth is not for all men, but only for those who seek it.
– Ayn Rand
So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of all money?
– Ayn Rand
Potentially, a government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.
– Ayn Rand
Money is the barometer of a society's virtue.
– Ayn Rand
Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason.
– Ayn Rand