Ayn Rand Quotes & Sayings

#1. Professional intellectuals are the voice of a culture and are, therefore, its leaders, its integrators and its bodyguards.

Ayn Rand

#2. I got the idea [for Anthem's theme] in my school days, in Soviet Russia, when I heard all the vicious attacks on individualism, and asked myself what the world would be like if men lost the word 'I.'

Ayn Rand

#3. It was the only lie she ever told. She did not do it to protect Francisco; she did it because she felt, for some reason which she could not define, that the incident was a secret too precious to share.

Ayn Rand

#4. You'll get everything society can give a man. You'll keep all the money. You'll take any fame or honor anyone might want to grant. You'll accept such gratitude as the tenants might feel. And I - I'll take what nobody can give a man, except himself. I will have built Cortlandt.
- Howard Roark

Ayn Rand

#5. 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.

Ayn Rand

#6. I cannot stand Tolstoy, and reading him was the most boring literary duty I ever had to perform, his philosophy and his sense of life are not merely mistaken, but evil, and yet, from a purely literary viewpoint, on his own terms, I have to evaluate him as a good writer.

Ayn Rand

#7. Beauty is a sense of harmony.

Ayn Rand

#8. No matter what night preceded it, she had never known a morning when she did not feel the rise of a quiet excitement that became a tightening energy in her body and a hunger for action in her mind - because this was the beginning of day and it was a day of her life.

Ayn Rand

#9. Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man's values, it has to be earned.

Ayn Rand

#10. A mystic is a man who treats his feelings as tools of cognition.

Ayn Rand

#11. Who was it that said he needed a fulcrum? Give me an unobstructed right-of-way and I'll show them how to move the earth!

Ayn Rand

#12. You are never called upon to prove a negative. that's a law of logic.

Ayn Rand

#13. A gun is not an argument.

Ayn Rand

#14. To what level of depravity has a society descended when it condemns a man simply because he is strong and great?

Ayn Rand

#15. 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.

Ayn Rand

#16. In a capitalist society, all human relationships are voluntary. Men are free to cooperate or not, to deal with one another or not, as their own individual judgments, convictions and interests dictate.

Ayn Rand

#17. The genius must have his freedom and his independence.

Ayn Rand

#18. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices

Ayn Rand

#19. The power of the sky can be made to do men's bidding. There are no limits to its secrets and its might, and it can be made to grant us anything if we but choose to ask.

Ayn Rand

#20. I do not care to be admired causelessly, emotionally, intuitively, instinctively - or blindly. I do not care for blindness in any form, I have too much to show - or for deafness, I have too much to say. I do not care to be admired by anyone's heart - only by someone's head.

Ayn Rand

#21. 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

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

Ayn Rand

#23. A house can have integrity, just like a person,' said Roark, 'and just as seldom.

Ayn Rand

#24. Economic strength to make a start. How do you expect

Ayn Rand

#25. And, after all, you've got to live."
"Not that way," said Roark.

Ayn Rand

#26. Dagny, why is it that most women would never admit that, but you do?"
"Because they're never sure that they ought to be wanted. I am."
"I do admire self-confidence."
"Self-confidence was only one part of what I said, Hank."
"What's the whole?"
"Confidence of my value - and yours.

Ayn Rand

#27. The attack on "selfishness" is an attack on man's self-esteem; to surrender one, is to surrender the other.

Ayn Rand

#28. It was a race he was running now, a race between his rent money and ... he did not know the name of the other contestant. Perhaps it was every man whom he passed on the street.

Ayn Rand

#29. The fact that a man has no claim on others ... does not preclude or prohibit good will among men and does not make it immoral to offer or to accept voluntary, non-sacrificial assistance.

Ayn Rand

#30. 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.

Ayn Rand

#31. My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists - and in a single choice: to live.

Ayn Rand

#32. It [ballet] projects a fragile kind of strength and a certain inflexible precision.

Ayn Rand

#33. I don't like people who try to say only what they think I think.

Ayn Rand

#34. Do it first and feel about it afterwards.' - Dagny Taggart

Ayn Rand

#35. Her face looked as if she knew his worst suffering and it was hers and she wished to bear it like this, coldly, asking no words of mitigation.

Ayn Rand

#36. I don't want to see you. I don't like you. I don't like your face. You look like an insufferable egotist. You're impertinent. You're too sure of yourself. Twenty years ago I would have punched your face with the greatest of pleasure.

Ayn Rand

#37. A thing is not high if one can reach it; it is not great if one can reason it; it is not deep if one can see its bottom.

Ayn Rand

#38. To rest one's case on faith means to concede that reason is on the side of one's enemies- that one has no rational arguments to offer.

Ayn Rand

#39. Compromise does not satisfy, but dissatisfies everybody; it does not lead to any general fulfillment, but to general frustration; those who try to become everything to all people end up by not being anything to anyone.

Ayn Rand

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

Ayn Rand

#41. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies...It is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the concept of 'Value' possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.

Ayn Rand

#42. The act of thinking is man's primary act of choice.

Ayn Rand

#43. I see man as a hero. With his own happiness as his moral obligation; productive achievementbas his noblest activity and reason as the only absolute.

Ayn Rand

#44. He stood looking at her. She knew that he did not see her. No, she thought, it was not that exactly. He always looked straight at people and his damnable eyes never missed a thing, it was only that he made people feel as if they did not exist. He just stood looking.

Ayn Rand

#45. But, you see, it's not what you do that matters really. It's only you."
"Me what?"
"Just you here. Or you in the city. Or you somewhere in the world. I don't know. Just that.

Ayn Rand

#46. They have taught man that he is a hopeless misfit made of two elements, both symbols of death. A body without a soul is a corpse, a soul without a body is a ghost- yet such is their image of man's nature: the battleground of a struggle between a corpse and a ghost, (john Galt)

Ayn Rand

#47. 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.

Ayn Rand

#48. The source of the government's authority is "the consent of the governed." This means that the government is not the ruler, but the servant or agent of the citizens; it means that the government as such has no rights except the rights delegated to it by the citizens for a specific purpose.

Ayn Rand

#49. 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.

Ayn Rand

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

Ayn Rand

#51. To abstain from condemning a torturer, is to become an accessory to the torture and murder of his victims.

Ayn Rand

#52. We asked so many questions that the Teachers forbade it.

Ayn Rand

#53. 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

#54. The nation which once held the creed that greatness is achieved by production, is now told that it is achieved by squalor.

Ayn Rand

#55. No," she said, before he could utter a word, "you can't take me home. I have a car waiting. Thank you just the same.

Ayn Rand

#56. The naked shoulder was gown's only ornament

Ayn Rand

#57. Howard, everything you've done in your life is wrong according to the stated ideals of mankind. And here you are. And somehow it seems a huge joke on the whole world.

Ayn Rand

#58. He walked with an effortless speed, feeling relaxed by a form of activity that was natural to him.

Ayn Rand

#59. The men I was fighting were impotent. The shiftless, the purposeless, the irresponsible, the irrational - it was not I who needed them, it was not theirs to dictate terms to me, it was not mine to obey demands.

Ayn Rand

#60. Life is the reward of virtue. And happiness is the goal and reward of life.

Ayn Rand

#61. Didn't you enjoy meeting the young men?"
"What men? There wasn't a man there I couldn't squash ten of.

Ayn Rand

#62. 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

#63. Married people dont look like they have bedrooms on their minds when they look at each other. In this world, either you're virtuous or you enjoy yourself. Not both ... Not both.

Ayn Rand

#64. No man can use his brain to think for another.

Ayn Rand

#65. His convictions to the wishes of others, be it the whole

Ayn Rand

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

Ayn Rand

#67. the proof of an achieved self-esteem is your soul's shudder of contempt and rebellion against the role of a sacrificial animal, against the vile impertinence of any creed that proposes to immolate the irreplaceable value which is your consciousness and the incomparable glory which is your existence

Ayn Rand

#68. Life is a value to be bought and thinking is the only coin noble enough to buy it.

Ayn Rand

#69. 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.

Ayn Rand

#70. Philosophically, Romanticism is a crusade to glorify man's existence; psychologically, it is experienced simply as the desire to make life interesting.

Ayn Rand

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

Ayn Rand

#72. She knew that she could not have reached this white serenity except as the sum of all the colors, of all the violence she had known.

Ayn Rand

#73. You are so lost to your higher self that you would resent me for my achievements, rather than celebrate them with me, sexually?

Ayn Rand

#74. ...Opinion without a rational process.

Ayn Rand

#75. The degree of a country's freedom is the degree of its prosperity.

Ayn Rand

#76. She started off, walking fast, as if the speed of her steps could give form to the things she felt.

Ayn Rand

#77. To achieve, you need thought

Ayn Rand

#78. I think. I am. I will.

Ayn Rand

#79. In order to fight any issue, it is necessary to fight for something, not merely against something.

Ayn Rand

#80. What is morality, she asked.
Judgement to distinguish right and wrong, vision to see the truth, and courage to act upon it, dedication to that which is good, integrity to stand by the good at any price.

Ayn Rand

#81. No man can predict the time when others will choose to return to reason.

Ayn Rand

#82. Man's character is the product of his premises.

Ayn Rand

#83. cardboard on the tips of his ten fingers, up the crimson-plushed stairway to Guy Francon's office. The cardboard displayed a water-color perspective of a gray granite

Ayn Rand

#84. You are damned, and we wish to share your damnation.

Ayn Rand

#85. This box is useless," said Alliance 6-7349.
Should it be what they claim of it," said Harmony 9-2642, "then it would bring ruin to the Department of Candles.

Ayn Rand

#86. There is no such thing as "the right to enslave".A nation can do it , just as a man can become a criminal - but neither can do it by right.
It doesn't matter in this context, whether a nation was enslaved by force (like soviet Russia), or by vote (like Nazi Germany).

Ayn Rand

#87. Since when did you take to abstract philosophy? You're only a businessman, you're not qualified to deal with questions of principle, you ought to leave it to the experts

Ayn Rand

#88. All public projects are mausoleums, not always in shape, but always in cost.

Ayn Rand

#89. Of metal, if one combined a truss with an arch, if one built diagonal

Ayn Rand

#90. The walls are cracked and water runs upon them within threads without sound, black and glistening as blood.

Ayn Rand

#91. The man who entered was a stranger. He was young, tall, and something about him suggested violence, though she could not say what it was, because the first trait one grasped about him was a quality of self-control that seemed almost arrogant.

Ayn Rand

#92. An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.

Ayn Rand

#93. Your soul has a single basic function-the act of valuing.

Ayn Rand

#94. She stopped over the ledge where he worked and she stood watching him openly. When he raised his head, she did not turn away. Her glance told him that she knew the meaning of her action, but did not respect him enough to conceal it. His glance told her only that he had expected her to come.

Ayn Rand

#95. 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.

Ayn Rand