Quotes by Ayn Rand (Page 3 of 4)

Romantic art is the fuel and the spark plug of a Man's soul. It's task is to set a soul on fire and never let it go out.

Men have been taught that it is a virtue to stand together. But the creator is the man who stands alone.

Men have been taught that their first concern is to relieve the suffering of others. ... To make that the highest test of virtue is to make suffering the most important part of life. Then man must wish to see others suffer in order that he may be virtuous. Such is the nature of altruism.

I want to know that I've accomplished something. I want to feel that it had some meaning. At the last summing up, I want to be sure it wasn't all-for nothing.

Every form of happiness if one, every desire is driven by the same motor -- by our love for a single value, for the highest potentiality of our own existence -- and every achievement is an expression of it.

Joy is the goal of existence, and joy is not to be stumbled upon, but to be achieved, and the act of treason is to let its vision drown in the swamp of the moment's torture.

I am, therefore I'll think.

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

You must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the secondary consequences.

Thinking men cannot be ruled; ambitious men do not stagnate.

Any work is creative work if done by a thinking mind.

Doctors are not servants of their patients, they are traders like everyone else in a free society and they should bear that title proudly considering the crucial importance of the services they offer.

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

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

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

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

The government was set to protect man from criminals, and the Constitution was written to protect man from the government.

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

Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value.

Virtue is not an end in itself. Virtue is not its own reward or sacrificial fodder for the reward of evil. Life is the reward of virtue-and happiness is the goal and the reward of life.

I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.

To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men.

The only thing that matters my goal my reward my beginning my end is the work itself. My work done my way. A private personal selfish egotistical motivation. That's the only way I function. That's all I am.

A businessman cannot force you to buy his product; if he makes a mistake, he suffers the consequences; if he fails, he takes the loss. If bureaucrat makes a mistake, you suffer the consequences; if he fails, he passes the loss on to you.

Don't help me or serve me, but let me see it once, because I need it. Don't work for my happiness, my brothers -- show me yours -- show me that it is possible -- show me your achievement -- and the knowledge will give me courage for mine.

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.

Errors of knowledge are not breaches of morality; no proper moral code can demand infallibility or omniscience.

Every man builds his world in his own image; he has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice. If he abdicates his power, he abdicates the status of man, and the grinding chaos of the irrational is what he achieves as his sphere of existence--by his own choice.

A rational man never distorts or corrupts his own standards and judgment in order to appeal to the irrationality, stupidity, or dishonesty of others.

The right to vote is a consequence, not a primary cause, of a free social system -- and its value depends on the constitutional structure implementing and strictly delimiting the voters' power; unlimited majority rule is an instance of the principle of tyranny.

He liked to observe emotions; they were like red lanterns strung along the dark unknown of another's personality, marking vulnerable points.

A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort ... is not strictly speaking a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang violence.

When you consider socialism, do not fool yourself about its nature. Remember that there is no such dichotomy as human rights versus property rights. No human rights can exist without property rights.

A good novel is an indivisible sum; every scene, sequence and passage of a good novel has to involve, contribute to and advance all three of its major attributes: theme, plot, characterization.

Capitalism has been called nationalistic -- yet it is the only system that banished ethnicity, and made it possible, in the United States, for men of various, formerly antagonistic nationalities to live together in peace.

I will not die, it's the world that will end. paraphrase of unknown philosopher.

A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race -- and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin.

There can be no compromise on basic principles. There can be no compromise on moral issues. There can be no compromise on matters of knowledge, of truth, of rational conviction.

I am an intransigent atheist, though not a militant one. This means that I am not fighting against religion -- I am fighting for reason.

It is fairly easy to grasp abstract moral principles; it can be very difficult to apply them to a given situation, particularly when it involves the moral character of another person.

Remember that rights are moral principles which define and protect a man's freedom of action, but impose no obligations on other men.

Altruism declares that any action taken for the benefit of others is good, and any action taken for one's own benefit is evil. Thus the beneficiary of an action is the only criterion of moral value -- and so long as that beneficiary is anybody other than oneself, anything goes.

The cult of moral grayness is a revolt against moral values.

It is easier to donate a few thousand to charity and think oneself noble than to base self-respect on personal standards of personal achievement.

It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money.

Ideas cannot be fought except by means of better ideas. The battle consists, not of opposing, but of exposing; not of denouncing, but of disproving; not of evading, but of boldly proclaiming a full, consistent, and radical alternative.

The right to life means that a man has the right to support his life by his own work (on any economic level, as high as his ability will carry him); it does not mean that others must provide him with the necessities of life.

The anti-mind is the anti-life.

Man's life is the standard of morality, but your own life is its purpose . If existence on earth is your goal, you must choose your actions and values by the standard of that which is proper to man--for the purpose of preserving, fulfilling and enjoying the irreplaceable value which is your life.

To the extent to which a man is rational, life is the premise directing his actions. To the extent to which he is irrational, the premise directing his actions is death.

To exist is to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of non-existence, it is to be an entity of a specific nature made of specific attributes.

There is a morality of reason, a morality proper to man, and Man's Life is its standard of value.
All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys it is the evil.

Since life requires a specific course of action, any other course will destroy it. A being who does not hold his own life as the motive and goal of his actions, is acting on the motive and standard of death.

By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man--every man--is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.

This, in every hour and every issue, is your basic moral choice: thinking or non-thinking, existence or non-existence, A or non-A, entity or zero.

Logic rests on the axiom that existence exists. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification.

Reality is that which exists; the unreal does not exist; the unreal is merely that negation of existence which is the content of a human consciousness when it attempts to abandon reason. Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man's only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.

The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.

You seek escape from pain. We seek the achievement of happiness. You exist for the sake of avoiding punishment. We exist for the sake of earning rewards. Threats will not make us function; fear is not our incentive. It is not death that we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to live.

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

When the common good of a society is regarded as something apart from and superior to the individual good of its members, it means that the good of some men takes precedence over the good of others, with those others consigned to the status of sacrificial animals.

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

Capitalism is based on individual rights -- not on the sacrifice of the individual to the 'public good' of the collective.

There are no contradictions. If you find one, check your premises.

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

The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence.

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

Do not make the mistake of the ignorant who think that an individualist is a man who says: I'll do as I please at everybody else's expense. An individualist is a man who recognizes the inalienable individual rights of man--his own and those of others.

If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose ... 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.

Namely, if I am challenging the base of all these institutions, I'm challenging the moral code of altruism. The precept that man's moral duty is to live for others. That man must sacrifice himself to others. Which is the present day morality.

The moral absolute should be: if and when, in any dispute, one side initiates the use of physical force, that side is wrong -- and no consideration or discussion of the issues is necessary or appropriate.

When men abandon reason, physical force becomes their only means of dealing with one another and of settling disagreements.

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

Man's rights can be violated only by the use of physical force. It is only by means of physical force that one man can deprive another of his life, or enslave him, or rob him, or prevent him from pursuing his own goals, or compel him to act against his own rational judgment.

Government holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force.

What is a demanding pleasure that demands the use of ones mind! Not in the sense of problem solving, but in the sense of exercising discrimination, judgment, awareness.

Altruism is a moral system which holds that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the sole justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, value and virtue. This is the moral base of collectivism, of all dictatorships.

The end does not justify the means. No one's rights can be secured by the violation of the rights of others.

No man can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation , an unrewarded duty or an involuntary servitude on another man. There can be no such thing as the right to enslave .

We the Living is not a novel 'about Soviet Russia.' It is a novel about Man against the State. Its basic theme is the sanctity of human life -- using the word 'sanctity' not in a mystical sense, but in the sense of 'supreme value.'

It is impossible to be consumed by a single passion without knowing its nature, no matter what rationalizations one constructs to hide it from oneself.

It is true that the welfare-statists are not socialists, that they never advocated or intended the socialization of private property, that they want to 'preserve' private property-with government control of its use and disposal. But that is the fundamental characteristic of fascism.

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.

He stepped to the window and pointed to the skyscrapers of the city. He said that we had to extinguish the lights of the world, and when we would see the lights of New York go out, we would know that our job was done.

Altruism does not mean mere kindness or generosity, but the sacrifice of the best among men to the worst, the sacrifice of virtues to flaws, of ability to incompetence, of progress to stagnation-and the subordinating of all life and of all values to the claims of anyone's suffering.

To preserve one's mind intact through a modern college education is a test of courage and endurance, but the battle is worth it and the stakes are the highest possible to man: the survival of reason.

Collectivism requires self-sacrifice, the subordination of one's interests to those of others.

The political function of 'the right of free speech' is to protect dissenters and unpopular minorities from forcible suppression -- not to guarantee them the support, advantages, and rewards of a popularity they have not gained.

I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows.

Whose steps were a restless substitute for flight.

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.

The social system based on and consonant with the altruist morality-with the code of self-sacrifice- is socialism, in all or any of its variants: fascism, Nazism, communism. All of them treat man as a sacrificial animal to be immolated for the benefit of the group, the tribe, the society, the state.

The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word 'selfishness' is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual 'package-deal,' which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind.

The fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.

The difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is a matter of time.

We have come to see how great is the unexplored.

It meant nothing to him any longer, only a faint tinge of sadness -- and somewhere within him, a drop of pain moving briefly and vanishing, like a raindrop on the glass of a window, its course in the shape of a question mark.

I can't compete and when I do, the rules of engagement change in the middle of the game. I'll let the powers that be vanquish themselves and return in three to five years to sift through the remains.

A 'whim' is a desire experienced by a person who does not know and does not care to discover its cause.

If an uncompromising stand is to be smeared as 'extremism,' then that smear is directed at any devotion to values, any loyalty  to principles, any profound conviction, any consistency, any steadfastness, any passion, any dedication to an unbreached, inviolate truth --  any man of integrity.

Don't ever get angry at a man for stating the truth.

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?

While, politically, a mixed economy preserves the semblance of an organized society with a semblance of law and order, economically it is the equivalent of the chaos that had ruled China for centuries: a chaos of robber gangs looting-and draining-the productive elements of the country.

The man without a purpose is a man who drifts at the mercy of random feelings or unidentified urges and is capable of any evil, because he is totally out of control of his own life. In order to be in control of your life, you have to have a purpose-a productive purpose.

We must know that we may know.

If that which we have found is the corruption of solitude, then what can men wish for save corruption? If this is the great evil of being alone, than what is good and what is evil?

You will follow me, if we are what we are, you and I, if we live, if the world exists, if you know the meaning of this moment and can't let it slip by, as others let it slip, into the senselessness of the unwilled and unreached.

What is kinder -- to believe the best of people and burden them with a nobility beyond their endurance -- or to see them as they are, and accept it because it makes them comfortable?

We are on strike, we, the men of the mind.
We are on strike against self-immolation. We are on strike against the creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties. We are on strike against the dogma that the pursuit of one's happiness is evil. We are on strike against the doctrine that life is guilt.

In the many months of his absence, she never wondered whether he was true to her or not; she knew he was. She knew, even though she was too young to know the reason, that indiscriminate desire and unselective indulgence were possible only to those who regarded sex and themselves as evil.

Sacrifice is the surrender of that which you value in favor of which you dont.

Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed.