Inspiring Quotes by Ayn Rand
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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.

Whose steps were a restless substitute for flight.

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.

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.

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

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?

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?

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.

The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.

Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?

Devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality; there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.

I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle.

I do not seek the good of others as a sanction for my right to exist, nor do I recognize the good of others as a justification for their seizure of my property or their destruction of my life.

Statism needs war; a free country does not. Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by producing.

When you force a man to act against his own choice and judgment, it's his thinking that you want him to suspend.

My real soul...? It's real only when it's independent.

You love people, not for what you do for them or what they do for you. You love them for their values; their virtues.

Rationality is the recognition of the fact that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it.

My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose.

When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit.

A rational man is guided by his thinking -- by a process of Reason -- not by his feelings and desires.

Action without thought is mindlessness, and thought without action is hypocritical.

A government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.

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

The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see.

Freedom: To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.

But, in fact, a person's sexual choice is the result and sum of their fundamental convictions. Tell me what a person finds sexually attractive and I will tell you their entire philosophy of life.

Let us throw away our candles and our torches. Let us flood the cities with light. Let us bring a new light to men!
-Equality 7-2521.

A gracefully effortless floating, flowing and flying are the essentials of the ballet's image of man.

You can't have your cake and let your neighbour eat it too.

Charity must be voluntary.

I've wanted to want it. I should think it would be exciting to become a dissolute woman.

They talked about nothing in particular, sentences that had meaning only in the sound of the voices, in warm gaiety, in the ease of complete relaxation.

Every honest man lives for himself. Every man worth calling a man lives for himself. The one who doesn't -- doesn't live at all.

Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach.

Politically, the goal of today's dominant trend is statism. Philosophically, the goal is the obliteration of reason; psychologically, it is the erosion of ambition.

The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.

In a free society, one does not have to deal with those who are irrational. One is free to avoid them.

Get the hell out of my way!

Glassy rustle which was the East River somewhere close by.

The difference between animals and humans is that animals change themselves for the environment, but humans change the environment for themselves.

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy.

All life is a purposeful struggle, and your only choice is the choice of a goal.

Competition is a by-product of productive work, not its goal.

By that time, a village half-wit could see what generations of professors had pretended not to notice.

I think that when in doubt about the truth of an issue, it's safer and in better taste to select the least numerous of the adversaries.

I love doing it. Every building is like a person. Single and unrepeatable.

Those who grant sympathy to guilt, grant none to innocence.

In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.

The skyline of New York is a monument of a splendour that no pyramids or palaces will ever equal or approach.

I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline.

Only a man of integrity can possess the virtue of honesty, since only the faking of one's consciousness can permit the faking of existence.