Top 1050 Quotes & Sayings by Ayn Rand
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Russian writer Ayn Rand.
Last updated on December 24, 2024.
The truth is not for all men, but only for those who seek it.
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.
Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.
The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.
The worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt.
Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think.
Man's unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself.
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.
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.
The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap.
When I die, I hope to go to Heaven, whatever the Hell that is.
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.
People create their own questions because they are afraid to look straight. All you have to do is look straight and see the road, and when you see it, don't sit looking at it - walk.
Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision.
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.
Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.
Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins.
If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.
Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values.
Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future.
A desire presupposes the possibility of action to achieve it; action presupposes a goal which is worth achieving.
Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.
Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone.
The ladder of success is best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity.
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.
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.
Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason.
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.
To achieve, you need thought. You have to know what you are doing and that's real power.
Rights are not a matter of numbers - and there can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting for us in our graves - or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.
A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.
The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
I don't build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.
So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of all money?
Money is the barometer of a society's virtue.
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).
To say 'I love you' one must first be able to say the 'I.'
Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.
The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me.
God... a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive.
Do not ever say that the desire to 'do good' by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.
To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one's thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one's mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.
The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see.
Evil requires the sanction of the victim.
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.
Every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics - a rational ethics - as a precondition of rebirth.
A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.
There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.
From the smallest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from one attribute of man - the function of his reasoning mind.
There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.
Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice.
When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion - when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed.
A businessman cannot force you to buy his product; if he makes a mistake, he suffers the consequences; if he fails, he takes the loss. If bureaucrat makes a mistake, you suffer the consequences; if he fails, he passes the loss on to you.
We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality
There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism - by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide.
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