Ayn Rand Quotes

668 Sourced Quotes

The upper classes are merely a nation's past; the middle class is its future.

Ayn Rand
Competition is a by-product of productive work, not its goal. A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.

Ayn Rand
A building has integrity, just like a man, and just as seldom.

Ayn Rand
Every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics - a rational ethics - as a precondition of rebirth.

Ayn Rand
Remember also that the smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.

Ayn Rand
I don't intend to build in order to have clients. I intend to have clients in order to build.

Ayn Rand
What is man? He's just a collection of chemicals with delusions of grandeur.
This line was said by the character Dr. Pritchett

Ayn Rand
There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.

Ayn Rand
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.

Ayn Rand
He liked to observe emotions; they were like red lanterns strung along the dark unknown of another's personality, marking vulnerable points.

Ayn Rand
The worst evil that you can do, psychologically, is to laugh at yourself. That means spitting in your own face.

Ayn Rand
Whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man's nature and of life's potential.

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
You know, I think that only if one feels immensely important can one feel truly light.

Ayn Rand
People don't want to think. And the deeper they get into trouble, the less they want to think. But by some sort of instinct, they feel that they ought to and it makes them feel guilty. So they'll bless and follow anyone who gives them a justification for not thinking. Anyone who makes a virtue - a highly intellectual virtue - out of what they know to be their sin, their weakness and their guilt.

Ayn Rand
Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man's genetic lineage—the notion that a man's intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.

Ayn Rand
Reality confronts man with a great many musts, but all of them are conditional the formula of realistic necessity is You must, if and the if stands for man's choice

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.

Ayn Rand
Integrity is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your consciousness, just as honesty is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake existence.

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
The government was set to protect man from criminals, and the Constitution was written to protect man from the government.

Ayn Rand
Morality is a code of black and white. When and if men attempt a compromise, it is obvious which side will necessarily lose and which will necessarily profit.

Ayn Rand
In this world, either you're virtuous or you enjoy yourself. Not both, lady, not both.

Ayn Rand
It was the joy of admiration and of one's own ability, growing together.

Ayn Rand
She knew that she could not have reached this white serenity except as the sum of all the colors, of all the violence she had known.

Ayn Rand
Never demand of another that which would constitute his sacrifice to you. Never grant that which would constitute your sacrifice to him.

Ayn Rand
Allies never trust each other, but that doesn't spoil their effectiveness.

Ayn Rand
The right to vote is a consequence, not a primary cause, of a free social system—and its value depends on the constitutional structure implementing and strictly delimiting the voters' power; unlimited majority rule is an instance of the principle of tyranny.

Ayn Rand
The plot of a movie is its motor. It is not an accident that people call pictures 'vehicles' for stars. A vehicle has to move. A plotless story is like an expensive car with a wonderful body design, luxurious seats, upholstery, headlights (production, direction, cast) — and no motor under its hood. That is why it gets nowhere.

Ayn Rand
America's skyscrapers were not built by public funds nor for a public purpose: they were built by the energy, initiative and wealth of private individuals for personal profit. And, instead of impoverishing the people, these skyscrapers, as they rose higher and higher, kept raising the people's standard of living — including the inhabitants of the slums.

Ayn Rand