Alisa Rosenbaum was born in pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg to a prosperous Jewish family. When the Bolsheviks requisitioned the pharmacy owned by her father, Fronz, the Rosenbaums fled to the Crimea. Alisa returned to the city (renamed Leningrad) to attend the university, but in 1926 relatives who had already settled in America offered her the chance of joining them there.
Let this list of 83 quotations by the Russian writer Ayn Rand lead you to an inspirational day. Recharge yourself with motivational rights, life, reality sayings, and satisfy your hunger for a better life.
What are the best Ayn Rand quotes?
We've made this hand-picked collection of quotes to show you what is Ayn Rand truly willing to say and leave for generations. Whether an inspirational quote or a motivational message about giving your best, we can all benefit from the wisdom, captured within these words.
Defiance, not obedience, is the American's answer to overbearing authority.
Potentially, 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.
I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil.
That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter.
The question isn’t who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me.
God... a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive.
Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.
The smallest minority on earth in the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
Rights are not a matter of numbers - and there can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob.
I don't build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.
Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting for us in our graves - or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.
Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth, the man who would make his fortune no matter where he started.
Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artists metaphysical value judgments.
The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see.
But what man does out of despair, is not necessarily a key to his character.
I have always thought that the real key is in that which he seeks for his enjoyment.
Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision.
A desire presupposes the possibility of action to achieve it;
action presupposes a goal which is worth achieving.
Do not ever say that the desire to "do good" by force is a good motive.
Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.
A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.
Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins.
Money is the barometer of a society's virtue.
Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.
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.
Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future.
Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think.
Man's unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself.
The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap.
Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-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. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it's yours.
Learn to value yourself, which means fight for your happiness.
Government "help" to business is just as disastrous as government persecution.
.. the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off.
The ladder of success is best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity.
Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.
No man may initiate the use of physical force against others.
No man-or group or society or government-has the right to assume the role of a criminal and initiate the use of physical compulsion against any man. Men have the right to use physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. The ethical principle involved is simple and clear-cut: it is the difference between murder and self-defense.
The writer who develops a beautiful style, but has nothing to say, represents a kind of arrested esthetic development; he is like a pianist who acquires a brilliant technique by playing finger-exercises, but never gives a concert.
One's own independent judgment is the means by which one must choose one's actions, but it is not a moral criterion nor a moral validation; only reference to a demonstrable principle can validate one's choices.
Rulers exist entirely through the persons of others.
Their goal is in their subjects, in the activity of enslaving. They are as dependent as the beggar, the social worker and the bandit. The form of dependence does not matter.
A man of independent judgment is a man of profound self-esteem.
Parties are intended to be celebrations, and celebrations should be only for those who have something to celebrate.
Romantic art is always stylized: the better the art, the cleaner and more attractive and intelligent the stylization.
