Ayn Rand - Quotes 1-100
But why should you care what people will say? All you have to do is please yourself.
Ayn Rand
I don't work with collectives. I don't consult, I don't co-operate, I don't collaborate.
Ayn Rand
It was the greatest sensation of existence: not to trust but to know.
Ayn Rand
To rest one's case on faith means to concede that reason is on the side of one's enemies - that one has no rational arguments to offer.
Ayn Rand
No speech is ever considered, but only the speaker. It's so much easier to pass judgement on a man than on an idea.
Ayn Rand
Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind, and a step that travels unlimited roads.
Ayn Rand
The small minority of adults who are unable rather than unwilling to work, have to rely on voluntary charity; misfortune is not a claim to slave labor; there is no such thing as the right to consume, control, and destroy those without whom one would be unable to survive.
Ayn Rand
In regard to the moral aspects of birth control, the primary right involved is not the 'right' of an unborn child, nor of the family, nor of society, nor of God. The primary right is one which - in today's public clamor on the subject - few, if any, voices have had the courage to uphold: the right of man and woman to their own life and happiness - the right not to be regarded as the means to any end.
Ayn Rand
Actors change, but the course of the tragedy remains the same. A humanitarian who starts with declarations of love for mankind and ends with a sea of blood.
Ayn Rand
A spirit, too, needs fuel. It can run dry.
Ayn Rand
Production is the application of reason to the problem of survival.
Ayn Rand
In a free society, one does not have to deal with those who are irrational. One is free to avoid them.
Ayn Rand
The faculty that works by means of concepts is reason. The process is thinking.
Ayn Rand
Freedom, in a political context, has only one meaning: the absence of physical coercion.
Ayn Rand
Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's value.
Ayn Rand
Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.
Ayn Rand
Observe that in World War II, both Germany and Russia seized and dismantled entire factories in conquered countries, to ship them home - while the freest of the mixed economies, the semi-capitalistic United States, sent billions worth of lend-lease equipment, including entire factories, to its allies.
Ayn Rand
As man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul.
Ayn Rand
The notion that 'Anything society does is right because society chose to do it,' is not a moral principle, but a negation of moral principles and the banishment of morality from social issues.
Ayn Rand
Anyone who fights for the future lives in it today.
Ayn Rand
There is only one source of authentic self-confidence: reason.
Ayn Rand
There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.
Ayn Rand
Humor is not an unconditional virtue; its moral character depends on its object. To laugh at the contemptible, is a virtue; to laugh at the good, is a hideous vice. Too often, humor is used as the camouflage of moral cowardice.
Ayn Rand
I think, therefore I'll think.
Ayn Rand
The word 'We' is as lime poured over men, which sets and hardens to stone, and crushes all beneath it, and that which is white and that which is black are lost equally in the grey of it. It is the word by which the depraved steal the virtue of the good, by which the weak steal the might of the strong, by which the fools steal the wisdom of the sages.
Ayn Rand
Fascism and communism are not two opposites, but two rival gangs fighting over the same territory… both are variants of statism, based on the collectivist principle that man is the rightless slave of the state.
Ayn Rand
Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea.
Ayn Rand
Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation's troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen.
Ayn Rand
Those who tell you that man is unable to perceive a reality undistorted by his senses, mean that they are unwilling to perceive a reality undistorted by their feelings. 'Things as they are' are things as perceived by your mind; divorce them from reason and they become 'things as perceived by your wishes.'
Ayn Rand
America was created by men who broke with all political traditions and who originated a system unprecedented in history, relying on nothing but the 'unaided' power of their own intellect.
Ayn Rand
The worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt.
Ayn Rand
A group, as such, has no rights. A man can neither acquire new rights by joining a group nor lose the rights which he does possess. The principle of individual rights is the only moral base of all groups or associations. Any group that does not recognize this principle is not an association, but a gang or a mob.
Ayn Rand
The process of thinking is the process of defining identity and discovering causal connections.
Ayn Rand
There is no principle by which genocide - a crime against a group of men - can be regarded as morally different from (or worse than) a crime against an individual: the difference is only quantitative, not moral. It can be easily demonstrated that Communism means and requires the extermination - the genocide, if you wish - of a particular human species: the men of ability.
Ayn Rand
Evil requires the sanction of the victim.
Ayn Rand
The quickest way to kill the human spirit is to ask someone to do mediocre work.
Ayn Rand
And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride. This god, this one word: 'I'
Ayn Rand
FCC power rests on… nonobjective law which delivers men's lives, fortunes, careers, ambitions into the arbitrary power of a bureaucrat who can reward or punish at whim.
Ayn Rand
The political function of 'the right of free speech' is to protect dissenters and unpopular minorities from forcible suppression - not to guarantee them the support, advantages, and rewards of a popularity they have not gained.
Ayn Rand
I am neither foe nor friend to my brothers, but such as each of them shall deserve of me. And to earn my love, my brothers must do more than to have been born. I do not grant my love without reason, nor to any chance passer-by who may wish to claim it. I honor men with my love. But honor is a thing to be earned.
Ayn Rand
Thinking is not an automatic function. In any hour and issue of his life, man is free to think or to evade that effort. Thinking requires a state of full, focused awareness. The act of focusing one's consciousness is volitional.
Ayn Rand
The notion of racial quotas is so obviously an expression of racism that no lengthy discussion is necessary. If a young man is barred from a school or a job because the quota for his particular race has been filled, he is barred by reason of his race. Telling him that those admitted are his 'representatives,' is adding insult to injury.
Ayn Rand
Self-respect is something that can't be killed. The worst thing is to kill a man's pretense at it.
Ayn Rand
Statism needs war; a free country does not. Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by production.
Ayn Rand
It has often been noted that a proof of God would be fatal to religion: a God susceptible of proof would have to be finite and limited; He would be one entity among others within the universe, not a mystic omnipotence transcending science and reality. What nourishes the spirit of religion is not proof, but faith, i.e., the undercutting of man's mind.
Ayn Rand
And here, over the portals of my fort, I shall cut in the stone the word which is to be my beacon and my banner. The word which will not die should we all perish in battle. The word which can never die on this earth, for it is the heart of it and the meaning and the glory. The sacred word: Ego
Ayn Rand
Money is the barometer of society's virtue.
Ayn Rand
Contrary to the prevalent views of today's alleged scholars, history is not an unintelligible chaos ruled by chance and whim - historical trends can be predicted, and changed - men are not helpless, blind, doomed creatures carried to destruction by incomprehensible forces beyond their control.
Ayn Rand
The basic premise of crude, primitive tribal collectivism is the notion that wealth belongs to the tribe or to society as a whole, and that every individual has the 'right' to 'participate' in it.
Ayn Rand
Nothing can raise a country's productivity except technology, and technology is the final product of a complex of sciences (including philosophy), each of them kept alive and moving by the achievements of a few independent minds.
Ayn Rand
In a fully free society, taxation - or, to be exact, payment for governmental services - would be voluntary. Since the proper services of a government - the police, the armed forces, the law courts - are demonstrably needed by individual citizens and affect their interests directly, the citizens would (and should) be willing to pay for such services, as they pay for insurance.
Ayn Rand
Wars are the second greatest evil that human societies can perpetrate. The first is dictatorship, the enslavement of their own citizens, which is the cause of wars.
Ayn Rand
A leash is a rope with a noose at both ends.
Ayn Rand
The basic need of the creator is independence. The reasoning mind cannot work under any form of compulsion. It cannot be curbed, sacrificed or subordinated to any consideration whatsoever. It demands total independence in function and in motive. To a creator, all relations with men are secondary.
Ayn Rand
There can be no compromise on basic principles. There can be no compromise on moral issues. There can be no compromise on matters of knowledge, of truth, of rational conviction.
Ayn Rand
Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants.
Ayn Rand
Dictatorship and determinism are reciprocally reinforcing corollaries: if one seeks to enslave men, one has to destroy their reliance on the validity of their own judgments and choices - if one believes that reason and volition are impotent, one has to accept the rule of force.
Ayn Rand
Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. The mind is an attribute of the individual.
Ayn Rand
Socialism is not a movement of the people. It is a movement of the intellectuals, originated, led and controlled by the intellectuals, carried by them out of their stuffy ivory towers into those bloody fields of practice where they unite with their allies and executors: the thugs.
Ayn Rand
There are only two fundamental methods by which men can deal with one another: by reason or by force, by intellectual persuasion or by physical coercion, by directing to an opponent's brain an argument - or a bullet.
Ayn Rand
An individualist is a man who says: 'I will not run anyone's life - nor let anyone run mine. I will not rule nor be ruled. I will not be a master nor a slave. I will not sacrifice myself to anyone - nor sacrifice anyone to myself.'
Ayn Rand
To the extent to which a man is rational, life is the premise directing his actions. To the extent to which he is irrational, the premise directing his actions is death.
Ayn Rand
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 breaches or fraud by the others, to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law.
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. If he abdicates his power, he abdicates the status of man, and the grinding chaos of the irrational is what he achieves as his sphere of existence - by his own choice.
Ayn Rand
Psychologically, the choice 'to think or not' is the choice 'to focus or not.' Existentially, the choice 'to focus or not' is the choice 'to be conscious or not.' Metaphysically, the choice 'to be conscious or not' is the choice of life or death.
Ayn Rand
The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man's self-defense, and, as such, may resort to force only against those who start the use of force.
Ayn Rand
Capitalism wins and holds its markets by free competition, at home and abroad. A market conquered by war can be of value (temporarily) only to those advocates of a mixed economy who seek to close it to international competition, impose restrictive regulations, and thus acquire special privileges by force.
Ayn Rand
So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another - their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.
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
Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life.
Ayn Rand
Only three brief periods of history were culturally dominated by a philosophy of reason: ancient Greece, the Renaissance, the nineteenth century. These three periods were the source of mankind's greatest progress in all fields of intellectual achievement - and the eras of greatest political freedom.
Ayn Rand
Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.
Ayn Rand
A right is the sanction of independent action. A right is that which can be exercised without anyone's permission. If you exist only because society permits you to exist - you have no right to your own life. A permission can be revoked at any time.
Ayn Rand
You have been the one encounter in my life that can never be repeated.
Ayn Rand
That an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error.
Ayn Rand
Faith in the supernatural begins as faith in the superiority of others.
Ayn Rand
No one is born with any kind of 'talent' and, therefore, every skill has to be acquired. Writers are made, not born. To be exact, writers are self-made.
Ayn Rand
The welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes.
Ayn Rand
That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, 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
The precondition of a civilized society is the barring of physical force from social relationships - thus establishing the principle that if men wish to deal with one another, they may do so only by means of reason: by discussion, persuasion and voluntary, uncoerced agreement.
Ayn Rand
But what man does out of despair, is not necessarily a key to his character. I have always thought that the real key is in that which he seeks for his enjoyment.
Ayn Rand
If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.
Ayn Rand
The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.
Ayn Rand
Be it a highwayman who confronts a traveler with the ultimatum: 'Your money or your life,' or a politician who confronts a country with the ultimatum: 'Your children's education or your life,' the meaning of that ultimatum is: 'Your mind or your life' - and neither is possible to man without the other.
Ayn Rand
The charming aspect of Christmas is the fact that it expresses good will in a cheerful, happy, benevolent, non-sacrificial way. One says: 'Merry Christmas' - not 'Weep and Repent.' And the good will is expressed in a material, earthly form - by giving presents to one's friends, or by sending them cards in token of remembrance.
Ayn Rand
Don't set out to raze all shrines, you'll frighten men, enshrine mediocrity - and the shrines are razed.
Ayn Rand
Of special significance to the present discussion is the egalitarians' defiance of the Law of Causality: their demand for equal results from unequal causes - or equal rewards for unequal performance.
Ayn Rand
Observe that any social movement which begins by 'redistributing' income, ends up by distributing sacrifices.
Ayn Rand
When 'the common good' of a society is regarded as something apart from and superior to the individual good of its members, it means that the good of some men takes precedence over the good of others, with those others consigned to the status of sacrificial animals.
Ayn Rand
Only a process of final causation - i.e., the process of choosing a goal, then taking the steps to achieve it - can give logical continuity, coherence and meaning to a man's actions.
Ayn Rand
Just as an individual has the right of self-defense, so has a free country if attacked. But this does not give its government the right to draft men into military service - which is the most blatantly statist violation of a man's right to his own life.
Ayn Rand
You don't see advocates of reason and science clogging a street in the belief that using their bodies to stop traffic will solve any problem.
Ayn Rand
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 worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living.
Ayn Rand
The human characteristic required by statism is docility, which is the product of hopelessness and intellectual stagnation. Thinking men cannot be ruled; ambitious men do not stagnate.
Ayn Rand
The businessman's tool is values; the bureaucrat's tool is fear.
Ayn Rand
Government control of a country's economy - any kind or degree of such control, by any group, for any purpose whatsoever - rests on the basic principle of statism, the principle that man's life belongs to the state.
Ayn Rand
Integrity does not consist of loyalty to one's subjective whims, but of loyalty to rational principles.
Ayn Rand
The intellectuals are a group that holds a unique prerogative: the potential of being either the most productive or the most parasitical of all social groups.
Ayn Rand
The American system is not a democracy. It is a constitutional republic. A democracy, if you attach meaning to terms, is a system of unlimited majority rule.
Ayn Rand
Many words have been granted me, and some are wise, and some are false, but only three are holy: 'I will it!'
Ayn Rand
