Ayn Rand Quotes

667 Sourced Quotes

A crime is the violation of the right(s) of other men by force (or fraud). It is only the initiation of physical force against others- i. e., the recourse to violence- that can be classified as a crime in a free society (as distinguished from a civil wrong). Ideas, in a free society, are not a crime- and neither can they serve as the justification of a crime.

Ayn Rand
People want nothing but mirrors around them. To reflect them while they're reflecting too... Reflections of reflections and echoes of echoes. No beginning and no end. No center and no purpose.

Ayn Rand
The sky is like a black sieve pierced by silver drops that tremble, ready to burst through.

Ayn Rand
It's not that I don't suffer, it's that I know the unimportance of suffering. I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one's soul and as a permanent scar across one's view of existence.

Ayn Rand
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.

Ayn Rand
You have been called selfish for the courage of acting on your own judgement and bearing sole responsibility for your own life. You have been called arrogant for your independent mind. You have been called cruel for your unyielding integrity. You have been calle anti social for the vision that made you venture upon undiscovered roads.

Ayn Rand
Fight for the value of your person. Fight for the virtue of your pride. Fight for the essence of that which is man: for his sovereign rational mind. Fight with the radiant certainty and the absolute rectitude of knowing that yours is the Morality of Life and that yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth

Ayn Rand
The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren

Ayn Rand
I know not if this earth on which I stand is the core of the universe or if it is but a speck of dust lost in eternity. I know not and I care not. For I know what happiness is possible to me on earth. And my happiness needs no higher aim to vindicate it. My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose.

Ayn Rand
The word which can never die on this earth, for it is the heart of it and the meaning and the glory. The sacred word: EGO.

Ayn Rand
There is no hope for the world unless and until we formulate, accept and state publicly a true moral code of individualism, based on man's inalienable right to live for himself. Neither to hurt nor to serve his brothers, but to be independent of them in his function and in his motive. Neither to sacrifice them for himself nor to sacrifice himself for them.

Ayn Rand
This miracle of me is mine to own and keep, and mine to guard, and mine to use, and mine to kneel before... The fortune of my spirit is not to be blown into coins of brass and flung to the winds as alms for the poor of spirit.

Ayn Rand
She did not know the nature of her loneliness. The only words that named it were: This is not the world I expected.

Ayn Rand
And that night we knew that to hold the body of women in our arms in neither ugly nor shameful, but the one ecstasy granted to the race of men.

Ayn Rand
All the reasons which made the initiation of physical force evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative.

Ayn Rand
If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans — I would choose — because it contains all the others—the fact that they were the people who created the phrase "to make money." No other language or nation had ever used these words before.... Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created.

Ayn Rand
Neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as man is free to attempt to survive by any random means, as a parasite, a moocher or a looter, but not free to succeed at it beyond the range of the moment—so he is free to seek his happiness in any irrational fraud, any whim, any delusion, any mindless escape from reality, but not free to succeed at it beyond the range of the moment nor to escape the consequences.

Ayn Rand
Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it's yours.

Ayn Rand
My greatest personal mistake is ever to allow a word or moment that doesn't count, i.e., that I do not refer to my own basic principles. Every word, every action, every moment counts. (This is the pattern on which everybody makes mistakes [or] becomes irrational — not relating their one action or one conviction to another.

Ayn Rand
A sexual relationship is proper only on the ground of the highest values one can find in a human being. Sex must not be anything other than a response to values.

Ayn Rand
Collectivism holds that the individual has no rights, that his life and work belong to the group (to "society," to the tribe, the state, the nation) and that the group may sacrifice him at its own whim to its own interests. The only way to implement a doctrine of that kind is by means of brute force - and statism has always been the poltical corollary of collectivism.

Ayn Rand
For the first time since her return, she felt pain, a violent pain, but it made her feel alive, because it was worth feeling.

Ayn Rand
One can't love man without hating most of the creatures who pretend to bear his name.

Ayn Rand
The doctrine that 'human rights' are superior to 'property rights' simply means that some human beings have the right to make property out of others.

Ayn Rand
Self respect is something that can't be killed. The worst thing is to kill a man's pretense at it.

Ayn Rand
If you mean whose side one should be on, Israel or the Arabs, I would certainly say Israel because it's the advanced, technological, civilized country amidst a group of almost totally primitive savages who have not changed for years and who are racist and who resent Israel because it's bringing industry, intelligence, and modern technology into their stagnation.

Ayn Rand
Those who say theory and practice are two unrelated realms are fools in one and scoundrels in the other.

Ayn Rand
I've always thought that a feeling which changes never existed in the first place.

Ayn Rand
Love is an expression and assertion of self-esteem, a response to one's own values in the person of another. One gains a profoundly personal, selfish joy from the mere existence of the person one loves. It is one's own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns, and derives from love....

Ayn Rand
The right to agree with others is not a problem in any society; it is the right to disagree that is crucial. It is the institution of private property that protects and implements the right to disagree - and thus keeps the road open to man's most valuable attribute: the creative mind.

Ayn Rand