Title Image - Quotes by Author Ayn Rand

It was the joy of admiration and of one's own ability, growing together.

--Ayn Rand

Whatever road I take, the guiding star is within me; the guiding star and the loadstone which point the way. They point in but one direction. They point to me.

--Ayn Rand

Guilt is a rope that wears thin.

--Ayn Rand

Because I never have any definite destination. This ship is not for going to places, but for getting away from them. When I stop at a port, it's only for the sheer pleasure of leaving it. I always think: here's one more place that can't hold me.

--Ayn Rand

Roark looked at him and understood. Roark inclined his head in agreement; he could acknowledge what Cameron had just declared to him only by a quiet glance as solemn as Cameron's.

--Ayn Rand

Roark spoke quietly. He was the only man in the room who felt certain of his own words.

--Ayn Rand

Roark threw his head up once, for a flash of a second, to look at Heller across the table. It was all the introduction they needed; it was like a handshake.

--Ayn Rand

Keating felt naked...People were his protection against people. Roark had no sense of people. Others gave Keating a feeling of his own value. Roark gave him nothing.

--Ayn Rand

He was usually disliked, from the first sight of his face, anywhere he went. His face was closed like the door of a safety vault; things locked in safety vaults are valuable; men did not care to feel that.

--Ayn Rand

Don't you know that most people take most things because that's what's given them, and they have no opinion whatever? Do you wish to be guided by what they expect you to think they think or by your own judgment?

--Ayn Rand

He was accustomed to hostility; this kind of benevolence was more offensive than hostility. He shrugged; he thought that he would be out of here soon and back in the simple, clean reality of his own office.

--Ayn Rand

For people who enjoyed their own presence well enough and sought only a place where they would be left free to enjoy it.

--Ayn Rand

The crowd had stared at him and given up angrily, finding no satisfaction. He did not look crushed and he did not look defiant. He looked impersonal and calm. He was not like a public figure in a public place; he was like a man alone in his own room, listening to the radio.

--Ayn Rand

You knew better than that. And it's such an old one to me. My antisocial stubbornness is so well-known that I didn't think anyone would waste time trying to tempt me again.

--Ayn Rand

I want to sleep with you. Now, tonight, and at any time you may care to call me. I want your naked body, your skin. your mouth, your hands...--I want you like an animal...or a whore.

--Ayn Rand

You're the most egotistical and the kindest man I know. And that doesn't make sense.
Maybe the concepts don't make sense. Maybe they don't mean what people have been taught to think they mean.

--Ayn Rand

Roark stood before them as each man stands in the innocence of his own mind. But Roark stood like that before a hostile crowd--and they knew suddenly that no hatred was possible to him.

--Ayn Rand

The audience looked at him. They felt he had no chance. They could drop the nameless resentment, the sense of insecurity which he aroused in most people. And so, for the first time, they could see him as he was: a man totally innocent of fear.

--Ayn Rand

I don't make comparisons. I never think of myself in relation to anyone else. I just refuse to measure myself as part of anything. I'm an utter egotist.

--Ayn Rand

The crowd would have forgiven anything, except a man who could remain normal under the vibrations of its enormous collective sneer.

--Ayn Rand

I do not recognize anyone's right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need.

--Ayn Rand

I hate incompetence. I think it's probably the only thing I do hate. But it didn't make me want to rule people. Nor to teach them anything. It made me want to do my own work in my own way and let myself be torn to pieces if necessary.

--Ayn Rand

What in hell are you really made of, Howard? After all, it's only a building. It's not the combination of holy sacrament, Indian torture, and sexual ecstasy that you seem to make of it.
Isn't it?

--Ayn Rand

A building has integrity, just as a man and just as seldom! It must be true to its own idea, have its own form, and serve its own purpose!

--Ayn Rand

The great creators-the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors-stood alone against the men of their time.

--Ayn Rand

Longer Version:

The great creators -- the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors -- stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new thought was opposed. Every great new invention was denounced. The first motor was considered foolish. The airplane was considered impossible... But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered and they paid. But they won.


My dear fellow, who will let you? That's not the point. The point is, who will stop me?

--Ayn Rand

But I don't think of you. -- Howard Roark.

--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

Roark smiled, Gail, if this boat were sinking, I'd give my life to save you. Not because it's any kind of duty. Only because I like you, for reasons and standards of my own. I could die for you. But I couldn't and wouldn't live for you.

--Ayn Rand

Believing in fate produces fate. Believing in freedom will create infinite possibilities.

--Ayn Rand

The entire history of science is a progression of exploded fallacies.

--Ayn Rand

Kira, the highest thing in man is not his god. It's that in him which knows the reverence due a god. And you, Kira, are my highest reverence.

--Ayn Rand

The man who produces while others dispose of his product is a slave.

--Ayn Rand

I am interested in politics so that one day I will not have to be interested in politics.

--Ayn Rand

He never felt lonliness except when he was happy.

--Ayn Rand

I am opposed to all forms of control. I am for an absolute, laissez-faire, free, unregulated economy.

--Ayn Rand

The Romanticists predominantly, were enemies of capitalism, which they regarded as a prosaic, materialistic, petty bourgeois system -- never realizing that it was the only system that could make freedom, individuality and the pursuit of values possible in practice.

--Ayn Rand

The worst evil that you can do, psychologically, is to laugh at yourself. That means spitting in your own face.

--Ayn Rand

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

--Ayn Rand

Longer Version:

The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.



The man-worshipers, in my sense of the term, are those who see man's highest potential and strive to actualize it. The man-haters are those who regard man as a helpless, depraved, contemptible creature-and struggle never to let him discover otherwise.

--Ayn Rand

You have no choice about your capacity to feel that something is good for you or evil, but what you will consider good or evil, what will give you joy or pain, what you will love or hate, desire or fear, depends on your standard of value.

--Ayn Rand

Style is not an end in itself, it is only a means to an end -- the means of telling a story.

--Ayn Rand

Man has a single basic choice: to think or not, and that is the gauge of his virtue. Moral perfection is an unbreached rationality-not the degree of your intelligence, but the full and relentless use of your mind, not the extent of your knowledge, but the acceptance of reason as an absolute.

--Ayn Rand

Allies never trust each other, but that doesn't spoil their effectiveness.

--Ayn Rand

I owe nothing to my brothers, nor do I gather debts from them. I ask none to live for me, nor do I live for any others. I covet no man's soul, nor is my soul theirs to covet.

--Ayn Rand

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

I mean the one that claims the pig is the symbol of love for humanity -- the creature that accepts anything. As a matter of fact, the person who loves everybody and feels at home everywhere is the true hater of mankind. He expects nothing of men, so no form of depravity can outrage him.

--Ayn Rand

Don't worry. They're all against me. But I have one advantage: they don't know what they want. I do.

--Ayn Rand

A desire to choose the hardest might be a confession of weakness in itself.

--Ayn Rand

I trust that no one will tell me that men such as I write about don't exist. That this book has been written--and published--is my proof that they do.

--Ayn Rand

Reason functions by integrating perceptual data into concepts.

--Ayn Rand

A man's interests depend on the kind of goals he chooses to pursue, his choice of goals depends on his desires, his desires depend on his values--and, for a rational man, his values depend on the judgment of his mind.

--Ayn Rand

Man is an end in himself.

--Ayn Rand

If you agree with some tenets of Objectivism, but disagree with others, do not call yourself an Objectivist; give proper authorship credit for the parts you agree with.

--Ayn Rand

If parasitism, favoritism, corruption, and greed for the unearned did not exist, a mixed economy would bring them into existence.

--Ayn Rand

Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer -- and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.

--Ayn Rand

A morality that holds need as a claim, holds emptiness-non-existence-as its standard of value; it rewards an absence, a defect: weakness, inability, incompetence, suffering, disease, disaster, the lack, the fault, the flaw-the zero.

--Ayn Rand

To demand 'sense' is the hallmark of nonsense. Nature does not make sense. Nothing makes sense.

--Ayn Rand

A leash is a rope with a noose at both ends.

--Ayn Rand

Defiance, not obedience, is the American's answer to overbearing authority.

--Ayn Rand

No one's happiness but my own is in my power to achieve or to destroy.

--Ayn Rand

To interpose the threat of physical destruction between a man and his perception of reality, is to negate and paralyze his means of survival to force him to act against his own judgment, is like forcing him to act against his own sight.

--Ayn Rand

Independence is the only gauge of human virtue and value. What a man is and makes of himself; not what he has or hasn't done for others. There is no substitute for personal dignity.

--Ayn Rand

I shall choose friends among men, but neither slaves nor masters. And I shall choose only such as please me, and them I shall love and respect, but neither command nor obey. And we shall join our hands when we wish, or walk alone when we so desire.

--Ayn Rand

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

--Ayn Rand

The Founding Fathers were neither passive, death-worshipin g mystics nor mindless, power-seeking looters; as a political group they were a phenomenon unprecedented in history: they were thinkers who were also men of action.

--Ayn Rand

Science was born as a result and consequence of philosophy; it cannot survive without a philosophical base. If philosophy perishes, science will be next to go.

--Ayn Rand

Courage and confidence are practical necessities ... courage is the practical form of being true to existence, of being true to truth, and confidence is the practical form of being true to one's own consciousness.

--Ayn Rand

Ideas are the greatest and most crucially practical power on earth.

--Ayn Rand

And here, over the portals of my fort, I shall cut in the stone the word which is to be my beacon and my banner. The word which will not die should we all perish in battle. 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

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

If people place such things as friendship and family ties above their own productive work, yes, then they are immoral. Friendship, family life and human relationships are not primary in a man's life. A man who places others first, above his own creative work, is an emotional parasite.

--Ayn Rand

Productive work is the central purpose of a rational man's life, the central value that integrates and determines the hierarchy of all his other values. Reason is the source, the precondition of his productive work, pride is the result.

--Ayn Rand

Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live.

--Ayn Rand

I cannot be called upon to know a negative or to prove a negative. if there is a god and you prove it, that's fine. but you don't tell me you can't know that there isn't. i would say yes i know there isn't because i have been given no evidence.

--Ayn Rand

And man will go on. Man, not men.

--Ayn Rand

Through all the darkness, through all the shame of which men are capable, the spirit of man will remain alive on this earth. It may sleep, but it will awaken. It may wear chains, but it will break through.

--Ayn Rand

Since only an individual man can possess rights, the expression individual rights? is a redundancy (which one has to use for purposes of clarification in today's intellectual chaos). But the expression collective rights? is a contradiction in terms.

--Ayn Rand

To irrational principles, one cannot be loyal. Ideas that are not derived from reality cannot be consistently practiced in reality.

--Ayn Rand

If capitalism had never existed, any honest humanitarian should have been struggling to invent it. But when you see men struggling to evade its existence, to misrepresent its nature, and to destroy its last remnants -- you maybe sure that whatever their motives, love of man is not one of them.

--Ayn Rand

I love you so much that nothing can matter to me -- not even you...Only my love- not your answer. Not even your indifference.

--Ayn Rand

The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind.

--Ayn Rand

Ferris: Are you going to be as impractical as that? Rearden: The evaluation of an action as practical, Dr. Ferris, depends on what it is that one wishes to practice. Ferris: Haven't you always placed your self-interest above all else? Rearden: That is what I am doing right now.

--Ayn Rand

I am. I think. I will.

--Ayn Rand

Every form of happiness is private. Our greatest moments are personal, self-motivated, not to be touched.

--Ayn Rand

Why yes, I can,' said Midas Mulligan, when he was asked whether he could name a person more evil than the man with a heart closed to pity. 'The man who uses another's pity for him as a weapon.

--Ayn Rand

Laissez-faire capitalism is the only social system based on the recognition of individual rights and, therefore, the only system that bans force from social relationships.

--Ayn Rand

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