Ayn Rand Quotes

667 Sourced Quotes

The skyline of New York is a monument of a splendor that no pyramids or palaces will ever equal or approach.

Ayn Rand
She knew that even pain can be confessed, but to confess happiness is to stand naked, delivered to the witness...

Ayn Rand
A culture is made — or destroyed — by its articulate voices.

Ayn Rand
Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.

Ayn Rand
The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world

Ayn Rand
She's a writer. The kind of writer who wouldn't be published outside. She believes that when one deals with words, one deals with the mind.

Ayn Rand
You'll get everything society can give a man. You'll keep all the money. You'll take any fame or honor anyone might want to grant. You'll accept such gratitude as the tenants might feel. And I - I'll take what nobody can give a man, except himself. I will have built Cortlandt. - Howard Roark

Ayn Rand
And what, incidentally, do you think integrity is? The ability not to pick a watch out of your neighbor's pocket? No, it's not as easy as that. If that were all, I'd say ninety-five percent of humanity were honest, upright men. Only, as you can see, they aren't. Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea.

Ayn Rand
The degree of a country's freedom is the degree of its prosperity.

Ayn Rand
And this is the whole shabby secret: to some men, the sight of an achievement is a reproach, a reminder that their own lives are irrational, and that there is no loophole - no escape from reason and reality. Their resentment is the cornered Dionysian element baring its teeth.

Ayn Rand
To demand 'sense' is the hallmark of nonsense. Nature does not make sense. Nothing makes sense.

Ayn Rand
No single one can possess greater wisdom than the many scholars who are elected by all the men for their wisdom. Yet we can. We do. We have fought against saying it, but now it is said. We do not care. We forget all men, all laws and all things save our metals and our wires. So much is still to be learned! So long a road lies before us, and what care we if we must travel it alone!

Ayn Rand
Whenever anyone accuses some person of being 'unfeeling,' he means that that person is just.

Ayn Rand
Compromise now, because you'll have to later, anyway, only then you'll have gone through things you'll wish you hadn't.

Ayn Rand
Observe how many people evade, rationalize and drive their minds into a state of blind stupor, in dread of discovering that those they deal with- their "loved ones" or friends or business associates or political rulers- are not merely mistaken, but evil. Observe that this dread leads them to sanction, to help and to spread the very evil whose existence they fear to acknowledge.

Ayn Rand
All life is a purposeful struggle, and your only choice is the choice of a goal.

Ayn Rand
We cannot fight against collectivism, unless we fight against its moral base: altruism. We cannot fight against altruism, unless we fight against its epistemological base: irrationalism. We cannot fight against anything, unless we fight for something—and what we must fight for is the supremacy of reason and a view of man as a rational being.

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
If you tell an amateur that his story is not good, he always declares indignantly: 'Oh, but it really happened just like this!' The writer who doesn't understand that this is beside the point is not a writer at all.

Ayn Rand
A good quotation must be a complete entity. It must be like a headline—sharp, clear, whole.

Ayn Rand
The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give 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
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
I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone's right to one minute of my life.

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
I understood that centuries of chains and lashes will not kill the spirit of man nor the sense of truth within him.

Ayn Rand
Some day, the world will discover that, without thought, there can be no love.

Ayn Rand
I am neither foe nor friend to my brothers, but such as each of them shall deserve of me. And to earn my love, my brothers must do more than to have been born. I do not grant my love without reason, nor to any chance passer-by who may wish to claim it. I honor men with my love. But honor is a thing to be earned.

Ayn Rand
There is no such thing as duty. If you know that a thing is right, you want to do it. If you don't want to do it—it isn't right. If it's right and you don't want to do it—you don't know what right is and you're not a man.

Ayn Rand
The only man never to be redeemed is the man without passion.

Ayn Rand