Ayn Rand - Quotes 201-300
A moment or an eternity - did it matter? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist.
Ayn Rand
Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man's only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.
Ayn Rand
'Democratic' in its original meaning refers to unlimited majority rule… a social system in which one's work, one's property, one's mind, and one's life are at the mercy of any gang that may muster the vote of a majority at any moment for any purpose.
Ayn Rand
Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. But, in fact, a man's sexual choice is the result and the sum of his fundamental convictions. Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life. Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself.
Ayn Rand
The infamous times you call the Dark Ages were an era of intelligence on strike, when men of ability went underground and lived undiscovered, studying in secret, and died, destroying the works of their mind, when only a few of the bravest martyrs remained to keep the human race alive.
Ayn Rand
Today, people are beginning to understand that the government's account is overdrawn, that a piece of paper is not the equivalent of a gold coin, or an automobile, or a loaf of bread - and that if you attempt to falsify monetary values, you do not achieve abundance, you merely debase the currency and go bankrupt.
Ayn Rand
Since things are what they are, since everything that exists possesses a specific identity, nothing in reality can occur causelessly or by chance.
Ayn Rand
Art (including literature) is the barometer of a culture. It reflects the sum of a society's deepest philosophical values; not its professed notions and slogans, but its actual view of man and of existence.
Ayn Rand
I write - and read - for the sake of the story. My basic test for any story is: 'Would I want to meet these characters and observe these events in real life? Is this story an experience worth living through for its own sake? Is the pleasure of contemplating these characters an end itself?'
Ayn Rand
What greater wealth is there than to own your life and to spend it on growing? Every living thing must grow. It can't stand still. It must grow or perish.
Ayn Rand
I can accept anything, except what seems to be the easiest for most people: the half-way, the almost, the just-about, the in-between.
Ayn Rand
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.
Ayn Rand
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.
Ayn Rand
The necessary consequence of man's right to life is his right to self-defense. In a civilized society, force may be used only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use.
Ayn Rand
I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone's right to one minute of my life.
Ayn Rand
There can be no justification for choosing any part of that which one knows to be evil.
Ayn Rand
To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That's what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul - would you understand why that's much harder?
Ayn Rand
The truth or falsehood of all of man's conclusions, inferences, thought and knowledge rests on the truth or falsehood of his definitions.
Ayn Rand
Learn to value yourself, which means: fight for your happiness.
Ayn Rand
One does not and cannot 'negotiate' with brutality, nor give it the benefit of the doubt. The moral absolute should be: if and when, in any dispute, one side initiates the use of physical force, that side is wrong - and no consideration or discussion of the issues is necessary or appropriate.
Ayn Rand
Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins.
Ayn Rand
Confidence in the power of man replaced dependence on the grace of God - and that rare intellectual orientation emerged, the key to the Enlightenment approach in every branch of philosophy: secularism without skepticism.
Ayn Rand
They do not want to own your fortune, they want you to lose it; they do not want to succeed, they want you to fail; they do not want to live, they want you to die; they desire nothing, they hate existence, and they keep running, each trying not to learn that the object of his hatred is himself.
Ayn Rand
There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.
Ayn Rand
If one's actions are honest, one does not need the predated confidence of others.
Ayn Rand
The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is self-sacrifice - which means; self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial, self-destruction - which means: the self as a standard of evil, the selfless as a standard of the good.
Ayn Rand
Ecology as a social principle… condemns cities, culture, industry, technology, the intellect, and advocates men's return to 'nature,' to the state of grunting subanimals digging the soil with their bare hands.
Ayn Rand
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.
Ayn Rand
We are all brothers under the skin - and I, for one, would be willing to skin humanity to prove it.
Ayn Rand
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.
Ayn Rand
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.
Ayn Rand
There is no such thing as a lousy job - only lousy men who don't care to do it.
Ayn Rand
Ethnicity is not a valid consideration, morally or politically, and does not endow anyone with any special rights.
Ayn Rand
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.
Ayn Rand
One of the methods used by statists to destroy capitalism consists in establishing controls that tie a given industry hand and foot, making it unable to solve its problems, and then declaring that freedom has failed and stronger controls are necessary.
Ayn Rand
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.
Ayn Rand
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.
Ayn Rand
An inventor is a man who asks 'Why?' of the universe and lets nothing stand between the answer and his mind.
Ayn Rand
Contrary to the ecologists, nature does not stand still and does not maintain the kind of equilibrium that guarantees the survival of any particular species - least of all the survival of her greatest and most fragile product: man.
Ayn Rand
An attempt to achieve the good by force is like an attempt to provide a man with a picture gallery at the price of cutting out his eyes.
Ayn Rand
The ladder of success is best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity.
Ayn Rand
Observe the paradoxes built up about capitalism. It has been called a system of selfishness - yet it is the only system that drew men to unite on a large scale into great countries, and peacefully to cooperate across national boundaries, while all the collectivist, internationalist, One-World systems are splitting the world into Balkanized tribes.
Ayn Rand
There's so much nonsense about human inconstancy and the transience of all emotions. I've always thought that a feeling which changes never existed in the first place.
Ayn Rand
The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap.
Ayn Rand
To abstain from condemning a torturer, is to become an accessory to the torture and murder of his victims.
Ayn Rand
I shall choose friends among men, but neither slaves nor masters. And I shall choose only such as please me, and them I shall love and respect, but neither command nor obey. And we shall join our hands when we wish, or walk alone when we so desire.
Ayn Rand
Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions.
Ayn Rand
I'm waiting, for what, my kind of people, what kind is that, I can tell my kind of people by their faces, by something in their faces.
Ayn Rand
The more you learn, the more you know that you know nothing.
Ayn Rand
Since the golden age of Greece, there has been only one era of reason in twenty-three centuries of Western philosophy. During the final decades of that era, the United States of America was created as an independent nation. This is the key to the country - to its nature, its development, and its uniqueness: the United States is the nation of the Enlightenment.
Ayn Rand
All public projects are mausoleums, not always in shape, but always in cost.
Ayn Rand
Capitalism cannot work with slave labor. It was the agrarian, feudal South that maintained slavery. It was the industrial, capitalistic North that wiped it out - as capitalism wiped out slavery and serfdom in the whole civilized world of the nineteenth century.
Ayn Rand
Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration.
Ayn Rand
Whatever road I take, the guiding star is within me; the guiding star and the loadstone which point the way. They point in but one direction. They point to me.
Ayn Rand
The advocates of collectivism are motivated not by a desire for men's happiness, but by hatred for man… hatred of the good for being the good; the focus of that hatred, the target of its passionate fury, is the man of ability.
Ayn Rand
Every argument for God and every attribute ascribed to Him rests on a false metaphysical premise. None can survive for a moment on a correct metaphysics.
Ayn Rand
Genius is an exaggeration of dimension. So is elephantiasis. Both may be only a disease.
Ayn Rand
Only a man of integrity can possess the virtue of honesty, since only the faking of one's consciousness can permit the faking of existence.
Ayn Rand
Thousands of years ago the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burnt at the stake he'd taught his brothers to light, but he left them a gift they had not conceived and he lifted darkness from the face of the Earth.
Ayn Rand
A man's ego is the fountainhead of human progress.
Ayn Rand
Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason.
Ayn Rand
Collectivism holds that, in human affairs, the collective - society, the community, the nation, the proletariat, the race, etc. - is the unit of reality and the standard of value. On this view, the individual has reality only as part of the group, and value only insofar as he serves it.
Ayn Rand
Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer - and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.
Ayn Rand
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.
Ayn Rand
There can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob.
Ayn Rand
The difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is a matter of time.
Ayn Rand
Man's unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself.
Ayn Rand
Aristotle may be regarded as the cultural barometer of Western history. Whenever his influence dominated the scene, it paved the way for one of history's brilliant eras; whenever it fell, so did mankind.
Ayn Rand
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.
Ayn Rand
Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?
Ayn Rand
The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.
Ayn Rand
Laissez-faire capitalism is the only social system based on the recognition of individual rights and, therefore, the only system that bans force from social relationships. By the nature of its basic principles and interests, it is the only system fundamentally opposed to war.
Ayn Rand
Every man is free to rise as far as he's able or willing, but the degree to which he thinks determines the degree to which he'll rise.
Ayn Rand
A quest for self-respect is proof of its lack.
Ayn Rand
Life is a value to be bought and thinking is the only coin noble enough to buy it.
Ayn Rand
Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of other men. Blood, whips and guns - or dollars. Take your choice - there is no other.
Ayn Rand
One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.
Ayn Rand
A building has integrity just like a man... and just as seldom.
Ayn Rand
Never mind the vicious nonsense of claiming that an embryo has a 'right to life.' A piece of protoplasm has no rights - and no life in the human sense of the term. One may argue about the later stages of a pregnancy, but the essential issue concerns only the first three months.
Ayn Rand
If men want to oppose war, it is statism that they must oppose. So long as they hold the tribal notion that the individual is sacrificial fodder for the collective, that some men have the right to rule others by force, and that some (any) alleged 'good' can justify it - there can be no peace within a nation and no peace among nations.
Ayn Rand
In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.
Ayn Rand
If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him.
Ayn Rand
Do not let the hero in your soul parish, in lonely frustration, for the life you deserved but never have been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won. It exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.
Ayn Rand
Abortion is a moral right - which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved; morally, nothing other than her wish in the matter is to be considered. Who can conceivably have the right to dictate to her what disposition she is to make of the functions of her own body?
Ayn Rand
Objectivists are not 'conservatives.' We are radicals for capitalism; we are fighting for that philosophical base which capitalism did not have and without which it was doomed to perish.
Ayn Rand
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.
Ayn Rand
The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me.
Ayn Rand
It is true that nuclear weapons have made wars too horrible to contemplate. But it makes no difference to a man whether he is killed by a nuclear bomb or a dynamite bomb or an old-fashioned club. Nor does the number of other victims or the scale of the destruction make any difference to him.
Ayn Rand
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.
Ayn Rand
The alleged shortcut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind.
Ayn Rand
Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy - a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but using your mind's fullest power.
Ayn Rand
To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. That is freedom. This and nothing else.
Ayn Rand
If some 'pacifist' society renounced the retaliatory use of force, it would be left helplessly at the mercy of the first thug who decided to be immoral. Such a society would achieve the opposite of its intention: instead of abolishing evil, it would encourage and reward it.
Ayn Rand
No man can live for another. He cannot share his spirit just as he cannot share his body. But the second-hander has used altruism as a weapon of exploitation and reversed the base of mankind's moral principles. Men have been taught every precept that destroys the creator. Men have been taught dependence as a virtue.
Ayn Rand
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.
Ayn Rand
Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone.
Ayn Rand
To achieve, you need thought. You have to know what you are doing and that's real power.
Ayn Rand
Do not ever say that the desire to 'do good' by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.
Ayn Rand
Remember that rights are moral principles which define and protect a man's freedom of action, but impose no obligations on other men.
Ayn Rand
Place nothing above the verdict of your own mind.
Ayn Rand
