Ayn Rand Quotes

667 Sourced Quotes

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
What is man? He's just a collection of chemicals with delusions of grandeur.

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

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

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

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

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

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
If there is any one proof of a man's incompetence, it is the stagnant mentality of a worker who, doing some small routine job in a vast undertaking, does not care to look beyond the lever of a machine, does not choose to know how the machine got there or what makes his job possible, and proclaims that the management of the undertaking is parasitical and unnecessary.

Ayn Rand
No man can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation, an unrewarded duty or an involuntary servitude on another man. There can be no such thing as " the right to enslave.

Ayn Rand
Of all the statist violations of individual rights in a mixed economy, the military draft is the worst. It is an abrogation of rights. It negates man's fundamental right-the right to life-and establishes the fundamental principle of statism: that a man's life belongs to the state, and the state may claim it by compelling him to sacrifice it in battle. Once that principle is accepted, the rest is only a matter of time.

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
If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders - What would you tell him?" I…don't know. What…could he do? What would you tell him?" To shrug.

Ayn Rand
People said it because other people said it. They did not know why it was being said and heard everywhere. they did not give or ask for reasons.

Ayn Rand
A rational man is guided by his thinking - by a process of Reason - not by his feelings and desires.

Ayn Rand
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

Ayn Rand
It is not death that we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to live.

Ayn Rand
Defiance, not obedience, is the American's answer to overbearing authority.

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

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
A 'whim' is a desire experienced by a person who does not know and does not care to discover its cause.

Ayn Rand
It's such a waste to be subtle and vicious with people who don't even know that you're being subtle and vicious

Ayn Rand
Any alleged 'right' of one man, which necessitates the violation of the rights of another, is not and cannot be a right.

Ayn Rand
One can study what exists and how consciousness functions; but one cannot analyze (or prove ) existence as such, or consciousness as such. These are irreducible primaries. (An attempt to prove them is self-contradict ory: it is an attempt to prove existence by means of nonexistence, and consciousness by means of unconsciousness.)

Ayn Rand