Ayn Rand Quotes

667 Sourced Quotes

The only purpose of education is to teach a student how to live his life-by developing his mind and equipping him to deal with reality. The training he needs is theoretical, i.e., conceptual. He has to be taught to think, to understand, to integrate, to prove. He has to be taught the essentials of the knowledge discovered in the past-and he has to be equipped to acquire further knowledge by his own effort.

Ayn Rand
An artist reveals his naked soul in his work - and so, gentle reader, do you when you respond to it.

Ayn Rand
You'd let the whole world perish rather than soil that immaculate self of yours with a single spot of which you'd have to be ashamed.

Ayn Rand
Litigants obey the verdict of a tribunal solely on the premise that there is an objective rule of conduct, which they both accept.

Ayn Rand
One must never allow oneself to acquire an exaggerated sense of one's own importance. There's no necessity to burden oneself with absolutes

Ayn Rand
Value is that which one acts to gain and/or keep. Virtue is the act by which one aims and/or keeps it.

Ayn Rand
As a cultural-intellectual power and a moral ideal, collectivism died in World War II. If we are still rolling in its direction, it is only by the inertia of a void and the momentum of disintegration. A social movement that began with the ponderous, brain-cracking, dialectical constructs of Hegel and Marx, and ends up with a horde of morally unwashed children stamping their foot and shrieking: "I want it now is through."

Ayn Rand
Unjust laws have to be fought ideologically; they cannot be fought or corrected by means of mere disobedience and futile martyrdom.

Ayn Rand
Political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries.

Ayn Rand
I can accept anything, except what seems to be the easiest for most people: the half-way, the almost, the just-about, the in-between.

Ayn Rand
Ah, there's nothing like tea in the afternoon. When the British Empire collapses, historians will find that it had made but two invaluable contributions to civilization — this tea ritual and the detective novel.

Ayn Rand
Your emotional capacity is an empty motor, and your values are the fuel with which your mind fills it. If you choose a mix of contradictions, it will clog your motor, corrode your transmission and wreck you on your first attempt to move with a machine which you, the driver, have corrupted.

Ayn Rand
Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy—a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but of using your mind's fullest power, not the joy of faking reality, but of achieving values that are real, not the joy of a drunkard, but of a producer.

Ayn Rand
Poverty, ignorance, illness and other problems of that kind are not metaphysical emergencies. By the metaphysical nature of man and of existence, man has to maintain his life by his own effort; the values he needs—such as wealth or knowledge—are not given to him automatically, as a gift of nature, but have to be discovered and achieved by his own thinking and work.

Ayn Rand
It's true that there's no such thing as free will. We can't help what we are or what we do. It's not our fault. Nobody's to blame for anything. It's all in your background... and your glands. If you're good, that's no achievement of yours - you were lucky in your glands. If you're rotten, nobody should punish you - you were unlucky, that's all.

Ayn Rand
He walked, groping for a sentence that hung in his mind as an empty shape. He could neither fill it or dismiss it.

Ayn Rand
Now you see, Dr. Stadler, you're speaking as if this book were addressing to a thinking audience. If it were, one would have to be concerned with such matters as accuracy, validity, logic and the prestige of science. But it isn't. It's addressed to the public.

Ayn Rand
Don't think. Believe. Trust your heart, not your brain. Don't think. Feel. Believe.

Ayn Rand
The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it.

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
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