Ayn Rand - People Quotes

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Reason can be fought with reason. How are you going to fight the unreasonable? The trouble with you, my dear, and with most people, is that you don't have sufficient respect for the senseless. The senseless is the major factor in our lives. You have no chance if it is your enemy.

Ayn Rand
People don't want to think. And the deeper they get into trouble, the less they want to think. But by some sort of instinct, they feel that they ought to and it makes them feel guilty. So they'll bless and follow anyone who gives them a justification for not thinking. Anyone who makes a virtue - a highly intellectual virtue - out of what they know to be their sin, their weakness and their guilt.

Ayn Rand
When intellectual leaders fail to foster the best in the mixed, unformed, vacillating character of people at large, the thugs are sure to bring out the worst. When the ablest men turn into cowards, the average men turn into brutes.

Ayn Rand
America's skyscrapers were not built by public funds nor for a public purpose: they were built by the energy, initiative and wealth of private individuals for personal profit. And, instead of impoverishing the people, these skyscrapers, as they rose higher and higher, kept raising the people's standard of living — including the inhabitants of the slums.

Ayn Rand
The important consideration is not your opponents, but yourself. It is bad to scream at them, not because it hurts them, they ought to be hurt, but because it hurts you. Anger is a form of recognition. It amounts to admitting that those people are important to you and that they have the power to hurt you. Actually, they haven't.

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
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
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
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
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
Never ask people. Not about your work. Don't you know what you want? How can you stand it, not to know?

Ayn Rand
I don't like people who speak or think in terms of gaining anybody's confidence. If one's actions are honest, one does not need the predated confidence of others, only their rational perception. The person who craves a moral blank check of that kind, has dishonest intentions, whether he admits it to himself or not.

Ayn Rand
America's abundance was created not by public sacrifices to the common good, but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America's industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages, and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance- and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way.

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
And what is the state but a servant and a convenience for a large number of people, just like the electric light and the plumbing system? And wouldn't it be preposterous to claim that men must exist for their plumbing, not the plumbing for the men.

Ayn Rand
We have only two sources of information about the character of the people around us: we judge them by what they do and by what they say (particularly the first).

Ayn Rand
There is nothing wrong in helping other people, if and when they are worthy of the help and you can afford to help them.

Ayn Rand
But why should you care what people will say? All you have to do is please yourself.

Ayn Rand
Is it advisable to spread out all the conveniences of culture before people to whom a few steps up a stair to a library is a sufficient deterrent from reading?

Ayn Rand
The people of Algiers marched through the streets of the city, in desperate protest against the new threat of civil war, shouting: 'We want peace! We want a government!' How are they to go about getting it? Through the years of civil war, they had been united, not by any political philosophy, but only by a racial issue. They were fighting, not for any program, but only against French rule. When they won their independence, they fell apart - into rival tribes and armed 'willayas' fighting one another

Ayn Rand
She watched the prairies the rivers, the towns slipping past at an untouchable distance below - and she noted that the sense of detachment one feels when looking at the earth from a plane was the same sense she felt when looking at people: only her distance from people seemed longer. - Dagny Taggart

Ayn Rand
But there are people who'll try to hurt you through the good they see in you—knowing that it's the good, needing it and punishing you for it. Don't let it break you when you discover that.

Ayn Rand
You said that some people told you that much of The Fountainhead couldn't happen. Tell them for me that it happened in The Fountainhead — and if they don't know what I mean, they have no business reading books at all. They don't know the difference between a book and yesterday's two-cent tabloid.

Ayn Rand
Compromise does not satisfy, but dissatisfies everybody; it does not lead to any general fulfillment, but to general frustration; those who try to become everything to all people end up by not being anything to anyone.

Ayn Rand
Are my characters copies of people in real life?... Don't ever believe the stories about authors putting people into novels. That idea is a kind of joke on both authors and readers. All the readers believe that authors do it. All the authors know that it can't be done.

Ayn Rand
People, he thought, were as hungry for a sight of joy as he had always been—for a moment's relief from that gray load of suffering which seemed so inexplicable and unnecessary. He had never been able to understand why men should be unhappy.

Ayn Rand
On second handers: [They are] always concerned with people - not facts, ideas, work or production. What would happen to the world without those who think, work, and produce?

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
You don't build for the way people live, but for the way they should live. I don't write about people as they are, but as they could be and should be.

Ayn Rand
People are not embracing collectivism because they have accepted bad economics. They are accepting bad economics because they have embraced collectivism.

Ayn Rand