Ayn Rand Quotes
The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see.
Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision.
My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose.
A desire presupposes the possibility of action to achieve it; action presupposes a goal which is worth achieving.
I worship individuals for their highest possibilities as individuals and I loathe humanity for its failure to live up to these possibilities.
There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.
I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.
Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason.
The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone.
Whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man's nature and of life's potential.
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.
Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice.
Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.
Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man’s values, it has to be earned.
Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter.
Rationality is the recognition of the fact that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it.
Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting for us in our graves - or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.
Devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality; there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.
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.
Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.
Potentially, a government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.
Joy is the goal of existence, and joy is not to be stumbled upon, but to be achieved, and the act of treason is to let its vision drown in the swamp of the moment's torture.
Man's unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself.
Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.
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.
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.
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.
"What is morality?" she asked. "Judgment to distinguish right and wrong, vision to see the truth, courage to act upon it, dedication to that which is good, integrity to stand by the good at any price. But where does one find it?
