Ayn Rand Quotes (341 Quotes)

The fortune my spirit is not to be blown into coins of brass and flung to the winds as alms for the poor of the spirit. I guard my treasures: my thought, my will, my freedom. And the greatest of these is freedom.

At a time like this, we can't afford the luxury of thinking!

I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle.

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

The course led them to the moment when, in answer to the highest of one's values, one's spirit makes one's body become the tribute, recasting it--as proof, as sanction, as reward--into a single sensation of such intensity of joy that no other sanction of one's existence is necessary.

When a man feels fear without reason, you call him to the attention of a psychiatrist; you are not so careful to protect the meaning, the nature and the dignity of love.

Ask anything of men. Ask them to achieve wealth, fame, love, brutality, murder, self-sacrifice. But don't ask them to achieve self-respect. They will hate your soul.

He wondered whether he really liked his mother. But she was his mother and this fact was recognized by everybody as meaning automatically that he loved her, and so he took for granted that whatever he felt for her was love. He did not know whether there was any reason why he should respect her judgment. She was his mother; this was supposed to take the place of reasons.

It's so much easier to pass judgment on a man than on an idea. Though how in hell one passes judgment on a man without considering the content of his brain is more than I'll ever understand.

The age of the skyscraper is gone. This is the age of the housing project. Which is always a prelude to the age of the cave.

The leaves had edges of silver that trembled and rippled like a river of green and fire flowing high above us.

But there are people who'll try to hurt you through the good they see in you--knowing that it's the good, needing it and punishing you for it. Don't let it break you when you discover that.

I take no pride in hopeless longing; I wouldn't hold a stillborn aspiration. I'd want to have it, to make it, to live it.

Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants.

The nation which once held the creed that greatness is achieved by production, is now told that it is achieved by squalor.

When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind - and it's roper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression.

Because the beauty of the human body is that it hasn't a single muscle which doesn't serve its purpose; that there's not a line wasted; that every detail of it fits one idea, the idea of a man and the life of a man.

I could die for you. But I couldn't, and wouldn't, live for you.

It's very uncomfortable to be a hero, Joel, and you don't have the figure for it.

The causes of illusions are not pretty to discover. They're either vicious or tragic.

The shadows of leaves fall upon their arms, as they spread the branches apart, but their shoulders are in the sun. The skin of their arms is like a blue mist, but their shoulders are white and glowing, as if the light fell not from above, but rose from under their skin. We watch the leaf which has fallen upon their shoulder and it lies at the curve of their neck, and a drop of dew glistens upon it like a jewel.

But you see, the measure of hell you're able to endure is the measure of your love.

I think it's a sin to sit down and let your life go without making a try for it.

Never think of pain or danger or enemies a moment longer than is necessary to fight them.

The view that man was ever to be drawn by some vision of the unattainable shining ahead, doomed ever to aspire, but not to achieve, my life and my values could not bring me to that.

When I die I hope to go to heaven--whatever that is--and I want to be able to afford the price of admission.

But a few understand that building is a great symbol we live in our minds, and existence is the attempt to bring that life into physical reality, to state it in gesture and form. For the man who understands this, a house he owns is a statement of his life.

I don't want to see you. I don't like you. I don't like your face. You look like an insufferable egotist. You're impertinent. You're too sure of yourself. Twenty years ago I would have punched your face with the greatest of pleasure.

Keating stood still, because he understood for the first time what it was that artists spoke about when they spoke of beauty.

The first right on earth is the right of the ego. Man's first duty is to himself. His moral law is never to place his prime goal within the persons of others. His moral obligation is to do what he wishes, provided his wish does not depend primarily upon other men.