Objectivism Ayn Quotes

#1. Everyone has the right to make his own decisions, but none has the right to force his decision on others.

Ayn Rand

#2. Saint Petersburg in revolt gave us Vladimir Nabokov, Isaiah Berlin, and Ayn Rand. The first was a novelist, the second a philosopher. The third was neither but thought she was both.

Corey Robin

#3. No happy person can be quite so impervious to pain (Gail Wynand to Dominique Francon)

Ayn Rand

#4. This, in every hour and every issue, is your basic moral choice: thinking or non-thinking, existence or non-existence, A or non-A, entity or zero.

Ayn Rand

#5. To irrational principles, one cannot be loyal. Ideas that are not derived from reality cannot be consistently practiced in reality.
as quoted by Leonard Peikoff in Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand

#6. I'm not asking you to do your best. I'm asking you to do your job. -Dagny Taggart

Ayn Rand

#7. I do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and I do not live in chronic dread of disaster. It is no happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that I regard as the abnormal exception in Human Life.

Ayn Rand

#8. The age of the skyscraper is gone. This is the age of the housing project. Which is always a prelude to the age of the cave.

Ayn Rand

#9. I never found beauty in longing for the impossible and never found the possible to be beyond my reach.

Ayn Rand

#10. The anti-mind is the anti-life.

Ayn Rand

#11. We are born into this world unarmed - our mind is our only weapon.

Ayn Rand

#12. I take no pride in hopeless longing; I wouldn't hold a stillborn aspiration. I'd want to have it, to make it, to live it.

Ayn Rand

#13. Before Ayn Rand coined the term "objectivists", we just called them "selfish assholes".

James Rozoff

#14. Man's life is the standard of morality, but your own life is its purpose . If existence on earth is your goal, you must choose your actions and values by the standard of that which is proper to man - for the purpose of preserving, fulfilling and enjoying the irreplaceable value which is your life.

Ayn Rand

#15. Only Marxists," Dr. Iggy concluded, opening the door to usher Joe into the chapel room, "still
believe in an objective history. Marxists and a few disciples of Ayn Rand.

Robert Shea

#16. Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.

Ayn Rand

#17. There is a morality of reason, a morality proper to man, and Man's Life is its standard of value.
All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys it is the evil.

Ayn Rand

#18. Reason is your means of survival - so that for you, who are a human being, the question 'to be or not to be' is the question 'to think or not to think..'.

Ayn Rand

#19. To exist is to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of non-existence, it is to be an entity of a specific nature made of specific attributes.

Ayn Rand

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

Ayn Rand

#21. 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

#22. There is an irrational, cultish tendency in many intellectual movements, and Objectivism, alas, is no exception. Ayn Rand's personal obsession with loyalty did little to discourage this trend ... Rand had often protested, 'Protect me from my followers!'

Nathaniel Branden

#23. I hope you don't have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.

Flannery O'Connor

#24. It is only in the realm of pure science that truth is an absolute criterion. When we deal with applied science, with technology - we deal with people. And when we deal with people, considerations other than truth enter the question.

Ayn Rand

#25. Who is John Galt?

Ayn Rand

#26. You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.

Ayn Rand

#27. Man is an end in himself.

Ayn Rand

#28. Men who reject the responsibility of thought and reason can only exist as parasites on the thinking of others.

Ayn Rand

#29. You want to know what's wrong with the world?" Dad paused. "It's this alienation that permeates every aspect of humanity.

Mark David Henderson

#30. Reality is that which exists; the unreal does not exist; the unreal is merely that negation of existence which is the content of a human consciousness when it attempts to abandon reason. Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man's only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.

Ayn Rand

#31. This was reality, she thought, this sense of clear outlines, of purpose, of lightness, of hope.

Ayn Rand

#32. I think, therefore I'll think.

Ayn Rand

#33. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.

Ayn Rand

#34. A process of reason is a process of constant choice in answer to the question: True or False? - Right or Wrong?

Ayn Rand

#35. Since life requires a specific course of action, any other course will destroy it. A being who does not hold his own life as the motive and goal of his actions, is acting on the motive and standard of death.

Ayn Rand

#36. 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.

Ayn Rand

#37. 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.

Ayn Rand

#38. Every form of happiness if one, every desire is driven by the same motor
by our love for a single value, for the highest potentiality of our own existence
and every achievement is an expression of it.

Ayn Rand

#39. Romantic love is the most selfish of all emotions.

Ellen Kenner

#40. The view that man was ever to be drawn by some vision of the unattainable shining ahead, doomed ever to aspire, but not to achieve, my life and my values could not bring me to that.

Ayn Rand

#41. 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

#42. Thousands of years ago the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burnt at the stake he'd taught his brothers to light, but he left them a gift they had not conceived and he lifted darkness from the face of the Earth.

Ayn Rand

#43. Indifference to me, is the epitome of all evil.

Elie Wiesel

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

Ayn Rand

#45. To the extent to which a man is rational, life is the premise directing his actions. To the extent to which he is irrational, the premise directing his actions is death.

Ayn Rand

#46. And no one rose to ask the question: Good?-by what standard?
John Galt

Ayn Rand

#47. No gift is worth a damn, unless its the most precious thing you've got.

Ayn Rand

#48. Ayn Rand's 'philosophy' is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society ... To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.

Gore Vidal

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. 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.

Ayn Rand

#52. If you know that this life is all that you have, wouldn't you make the most of it?

Ayn Rand

#53. Logic rests on the axiom that existence exists. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification.

Ayn Rand

#54. To sum it all up, the [Ayn] Rand belief system looks like this:
1. Facts are facts: things can be absolutely right or absolutely wrong, as determined by reason.
2. According to my reasoning, I am absolutely right.
3. Charity is immoral.
4. Pay for your own fucking schools.

Matt Taibbi

#55. I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough.

Christopher Hitchens

#56. Charity must be voluntary.

Ayn Rand