Ayn Rand - Atlas Shrugged (1957)

84 Sourced Quotes

View all Ayn Rand Quotes
Do you know the hallmark of the second-rater? It's resentment of another man's achievement.

Ayn Rand
An animal is equipped for sustaining its life; its senses provide it with an automatic code of action, an automatic knowledge of what is good for it or evil... Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice.

Ayn Rand
Whether you know the shape of a pebble or the structure of a solar system, the anxioms remain the same: that it exists and that you know it.

Ayn Rand
Parties are intended to be celebrations, and celebrations should be only for those who have something to celebrate.

Ayn Rand
When I die, I hope to go to Heaven, whatever the Hell that is.

Ayn Rand
Never think of pain or danger or enemies a moment longer than is necessary to fight them.

Ayn Rand
She knew, even though she was too young to know the reason, that indiscriminate desire and unselective sex were possible only to those who regarded sex and themselves as evil.

Ayn Rand
What greater wealth is there than to own your life and to spend it on growing? Every living thing must grow. It can't stand still. It must grow or perish.

Ayn Rand
My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.

Ayn Rand
An inventor is a man who asks 'Why?' of the universe and lets nothing stand between the answer and his mind.

Ayn Rand
She fell asleep, lying there, her hand clasping his. Her last awareness, before she surrendered the responsibility of consciousness, was the sense of an enormous void, the void of a city and of a continent, where she would never be able to find the man whom she had no right to seek.

Ayn Rand
An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.

Ayn Rand
If you tell an ugly woman that she is beautiful, you offer her the great homage of corrupting the concept of beauty.

Ayn Rand
Don't think of them now. Never think of pain or danger or enemies a moment longer than is necessary to fight them. You're here. It's our time and our life, not theirs. Don't struggle not to be happy. You are." - John Gault

Ayn Rand
I think it's funny. There was a time when men were afraid that somebody would reveal some secret of theirs that was unknown to their fellows. Nowadays, they're afraid that somebody will name what everybody knows. Have you practical people ever thought that that's all it would take to blast your whole, big, complex structure, with all your laws and guns - just somebody naming the exact nature of what you're doing?

Ayn Rand
God... a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive.

Ayn Rand
Just as man can't exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one's rights into reality, to think, to work and keep the results, which means: the right of property.

Ayn Rand
A desire presupposes the possibility of action to achieve it; action presupposes a goal which is worth achieving.

Ayn Rand
You are an indivisible entity of matter and consciousness. Renounce your consciousness and you become a brute. Renounce your body and you become a fake. Renounce the material world and you surrender it to evil.

Ayn Rand
The adversary she found herself forced to fight was not worth matching or beating; it was not a superior ability which she would have found honor in challenging; it was ineptitude.

Ayn Rand
So you think that money is the root of all evil? Have you ever asked what is the root of money?

Ayn Rand
That which exists possesses identity; he could keep it out of existence by refusing to identify it.

Ayn Rand
To hold an unchanging youth is to reach at the end, the vision with which one started.

Ayn Rand
I saw that evil was impotent—that evil was the irrational, the blind, the anti-real—and that the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it.

Ayn Rand