Ayn Rand Quotes

668 Sourced Quotes

Whether it's a symphony or a coal mine, all work is an act of creating and comes from the same source: from an inviolate capacity to see through one's own eyes-which means: the capacity to perform a rational identification- which means: the capacity to see, to connect and to make what had not been seen, connected and made before.

Ayn Rand
Our dearest one. Fear nothing of the forest. There is no danger in solitude. We have no need of our brothers. Let us forget their good and our evil, let us forget all things save that we are together and that there is joy as a bond between us. Give us your hand. Look ahead. It is our own world, Golden One, a strange, unknown world, but our own.

Ayn Rand
An irresponsible person is a person who makes vague promises, then breaks his word, blames it on circumstances and expects other people to forgive it.

Ayn Rand
No happy person can be quite so impervious to pain (Gail Wynand to Dominique Francon)

Ayn Rand
The causes of illusions are not pretty to discover. They're either vicious or tragic.

Ayn Rand
I refuse to accept as guilt the fact of my own existence.

Ayn Rand
To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one's thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one's mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.

Ayn Rand
The man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.

Ayn Rand
The worst wars are religious wars between sects of the same religion or civil wars between brothers of the same race.

Ayn Rand
Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).

Ayn Rand
Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires.

Ayn Rand
Because the beauty of the human body is that it hasn't a single muscle which doesn't serve its purpose; that there's not a line wasted; that every detail of it fits one idea, the idea of a man and the life of a man.

Ayn Rand
A story is an end in itself. It is not written to teach, sell, explain or destroy anything. It is not written even to entertain. It is written as a man is born — an organic whole, dictated only by its own laws and its own necessity — an end in itself, not a means to an end.

Ayn Rand
Roark smiled, "Gail, if this boat were sinking, I'd give my life to save you. Not because it's any kind of duty. Only because I like you, for reasons and standards of my own. I could die for you. But I couldn't and wouldn't live for you.

Ayn Rand
I want to be prepared to claim the greatest virtue of all - that I was a man who made money

Ayn Rand
Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice... Man has to be a man-by choice; he has to hold his life as a value-by choice; he has to learn to sustain it-by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues by choice. A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.

Ayn Rand
What is greatness? I will answer: it is the capacity to live by the three fundamental values of John Galt: reason, purpose, self-esteem.

Ayn Rand
She sat leaning back in her chair, looking ahead, knowing that he was as aware of her as she was of him. She found pleasure in the special self-consciousness it gave her. When she crossed her legs, when she leaned on her arm against the window sill, when she brushed her hair off her forehead - every movement of her body was underscored by a feeling the unadmitted words for which were: Is he seeing it?

Ayn Rand
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
The moral precept to adopt... is: Judge, and be prepared to be judged.

Ayn Rand
If a drought strikes them, animals perish—man builds irrigation canals; if a flood strikes them, animals perish—man builds dams; if a carnivorous pack attacks them, animals perish—man writes the Constitution of the United States.

Ayn Rand
The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind

Ayn Rand
I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline.

Ayn Rand
You're not sorry. You could've been here if you made the effort. But when did you ever make an effort for anybody but yourself? You're not interested in any of us or in anything we do. You think if you pay the bills, that's enough, don't you? Money! That's all you know. And all you give us is money. Have you even given us any time?

Ayn Rand
The man who produces while others dispose of his product is a slave.

Ayn Rand
One of the paradoxes of our age is the fact that the intellectuals, the politicians, and all the sundry voices that choke like asthma the throat of our communications media, have never gasped and stuttered so loudly about their devotion to the public good, and about the people's will as the supreme criterion of value - and never have they been so grossly indifferent to the people. The reason, obviously, is that collectivist slogans serve as the rationalization for those who intend, not to follow the people, but to rule them.

Ayn Rand
To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men.

Ayn Rand
Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked: 'Account Overdrawn.'

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
Another current catch-phrase is the complaint that the nations of the world are divided into 'haves' and the 'have-nots.' Observe that the 'haves' are those who have freedom, and that it is freedom that the 'have-nots' have not.

Ayn Rand