Ayn Rand Quotes

A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.

Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values.

The question isn't 'who is going to let me'; it's 'who is going to stop me'.

The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.

Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice.

To say I love you one must know first how to say the I.

The worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt.

The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me.

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

The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.

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.

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

The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.

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.

There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.

The question isn’t who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me.

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.

Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.

Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone.

Thinking men cannot be ruled.

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

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.

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.

The smallest minority on earth in the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.

I don't build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.

Evil requires the sanction of the victim.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artists metaphysical value judgments.

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.

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

Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.

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.

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.

Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision.

To deal with men by force is as impractical as to deal with nature by persuasion.

A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.

Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins.

Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think.

Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future.

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.

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

Money is the barometer of a society's virtue.

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.

The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap.

The ladder of success is best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity.

Man's unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself.

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.

Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.

Learn to value yourself, which means fight for your happiness.

There’s nothing as significant as a human face.

Nor as eloquent. We can never really know another person, except by our first glance at him. Because, in that glance, we know everything. Even though we’re not always wise enough to unravel the knowledge.

From the smallest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from one attribute of man - the function of his reasoning mind.

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy.

The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

It only stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.

Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.

A chronic lack of pleasure, of any enjoyable, rewarding or stimulating experiences, produces a slow, gradual, day-by-day erosion of man's emotional vitality, which he may ignore or repress, but which is recorded by the relentless computer of his subconscious mechanism that registers an ebbing flow, then a trickle, then a few last drops of fuel--until the day when his inner motor stops and he wonders desperately why he has no desire to go on, unable to find any definable cause of his hopeless, chronic sense of exhaustion.

Every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics - a rational ethics - as a precondition of rebirth.