Ayn Rand Quotes on Vice & Virtue (11 Quotes)



    Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices


    ... there's nothing of any importance in life except how well you do your work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are, will come from that. It's the only measure of human value. All the codes of ethics they'll try to ram down your throat are just so much paper money put out by swindlers to fleece people of their virtues. The code of competence is the only system of morality that's on a gold standard.

    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.


    Money is the barometer of a society's virtue.

    I want you to observe, that those who cry the loudest about their disillusionment, about the failure of virtue, the futility of reason, the impotence of logic are those who have achieved the full, exact, logical result of the ideas they preached, so mercilessly logical that they dare not identify it. In a world that proclaims the non-existence of the mind, the moral righteousness of rule by brute force, the penalizing of the competent in favour of the incompetent, the sacrifice of the best to the worst in such a world, the best have to turn against society and have to become it's deadliest enemies.

    All your life, you have heard yourself denounced not for your faults, but for your greatest virtues. You have been hated, not for your mistakes, but for your achievements. You have been scorned for all those qualities of character which are your highest.

    You'll come back, because yours is an error of knowledge, not a moral failure, not an act of surrender to evil, but only the last act of being victim to your own virtue. We'll wait for you and when you come back, you will have discovered that there need never be any conflict among your desires, nor so tragic a clash of values as the one you've borne so well.

    Did you ask me to name man's motive power Man's motive power is his moral code. Ask yourself where their code is leading you and what it offers you as your final goal. A viler evil than to murder a man, is to sell him suicide as an act of virtue. A viler evil than to throw a man into a sacrificial furnace, is to demand that he leap in, of his own will, and that he build the furnace, besides. By their own statement, it is they who need you and have nothing to offer you in return. By their own statement, you must support them because they cannot survive without you. Consider the obscenity of offering their impotence and their need their need of you as a justification for your torture. Are you willing to accept it Do you care to purchase at the price of your great endurance, at the price of your agony the satisfaction of the needs of your own destroyers.

    My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom existence exists and in a single choice to live. The rest proceeds from these. To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life Reason Purpose Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worth of happiness, which means is worthy of living. These three values imply and require all of man's virtues, and all his virtues pertain to the relation of existence and consciousness rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride.


    More Ayn Rand Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Man - Mind - Life - Money & Wealth - World - Morality - Reality - Good & Evil - Love - Value - Honesty & Integrity - Success - Purposes - Vice & Virtue - Thought & Thinking - Sense & Perception - Happiness - Efforts - Reasoning - View All Ayn Rand Quotations

    More Ayn Rand Quotations (By Book Titles)


    - Anthem
    - Atlas Shrugged
    - The Fountainhead

    Related Authors


    Voltaire - Rudyard Kipling - Paul Davies - Michael Cunningham - Margaret J. Wheatley - Henry Lawson - Henry Drummond - Dr. Seuss - Catherine Crowe - Anne Frank


Authors (by First Name)

A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - I - J - K - L - M
N - O - P - Q - R - S - T - U - V - W - X - Y - Z

Other Inspiring Sections