Ayn Rand Quotes (341 Quotes)

To me, there is only one form of human depravity the man without a purpose.

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.

Don't rely on our knowledge of what's best for your future. We do know, but it can't be best until you know it.

There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.

A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.

Man is a being with free will therefore, each man is potentially good or evil, and its up to him and only him (through his reasoning mind) to decide which he wants to be.

The music of his Fifth Concerto streamed from his keyboard, past the glass of the window, and spread through the air, over the lights of the valley. It was a symphony of triumph. The notes flowed up, they spoke of rising and they were the rising itself, they were the essence and the form of upward motion, they seemed to embody every human act and thought that had ascent as its motive. It was a sunburst of sound, breaking out of hiding and spreading open. It had the freedom of release and the tension of purpose. It swept space clean and left nothing buy the joy of an unobstructed effort. Only a faint echo within the sounds spoke of that from which the music had escaped, but spoke in laughing astonishment at the discovery that there was no ugliness or pain, and there never had had to be. It was the song of an immense deliverance.

Neither am I the means to any end others may wish to accomplish. I am not a tool for their use. I am not a servant of their needs. I am not a bandage for their wounds. I am not a sacrifice on their altars.

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.

The ladder of success is best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity.

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.

If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.

To interpose the threat of physical destruction between a man and his perception of reality, is to negate and paralyze his means of survival to force him to act against his own judgment, is like forcing him to act against his own sight

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.

Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice.

Consider the reasons which make us certain that we are right, but not the fact that we are certain. If you are not convinced, ignore our certainty. Don't be tempted to substitute our judgment for your own.

There was no such person as Mrs. Wayne Wilmot there was only a shell containing the opinions of her friends, the picture postcards she had seen, the novels of country squires she had read

The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.

Kill reverence and you've killed the hero in man.

He thought of all the living species that train their young in the art of survival, the cats who teach their kittens to hunt, the birds who spend such strident efforts on teaching their fledglings to fly - yet man, whose tool of survival is the mind, does not merely fail to teach a child to think, but devotes the child's education to the purpose of destroying his brain, of convincing him that thought is futile and evil, before he has started to think ... Men would shudder, he thought, if they saw a mother bird plucking the feathers from the wings of her young, then pushing him out of the nest to struggle for survival - yet that was what they did to their children.

Contrary to the vulgar belief that men are motivated primarily by materialistic considerations, we now see the capitalist system being discredited and destroyed all over the world, even though this system has given men the greatest material comforts.

To demand 'sense' is the hallmark of nonsense. Nature does not make sense. Nothing makes sense.

To achieve, you need thought. You have to know what you are doing and that's real power.

I would step in the way of a bullet if it were aimed at my husband. It is not self-sacrifice to die protecting that which you value If the value is great enough, you do not care to exist without it. This applies to any alleged sacrifice for those one loves.

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.

The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap.

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.

If that's the price of getting together, then I'll be damned if I want to live on the same earth with any human beings If the rest of them can survive only by destroying us, then why should we wish them to survive Nothing can make self-immolation proper. Nothing can give them the right to turn men into sacrificial animals. Nothing can make it moral to destroy the best. One can't be punished for being good. One can't be penalized for ability. If that is right, then we'd better start slaughtering one another, because there isn't any right at all in the world.

I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction. - Anthem

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.

All work is an act of philosophy.

I don't build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.

The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other - until one day when they are suddenly declared to be the country's official ideology.

The truth is not for all men, but only for those who seek it.

The only proper purpose of a government is to protect mans rights, which means to protect him from physical violence.... The only proper functions of a government are the police, to protect you from criminals the army, to protect you from foreign invaders and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, and to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law.

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.

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.

A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.

Evil requires the sanction of the victim.

Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equalled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism.

If a life could have a theme song and I believe every worthwhile one has mine is a religion, an obsession, a mania or all of these expressed in one word individualism. I was born with that obsession, and I've never seen and do not know now a cause more worthy, more misunderstood, more seemingly hopeless and tragically needed.