Objectivism Ayn Rand Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. 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

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

James Rozoff

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. Charity must be voluntary.

Ayn Rand

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

Elie Wiesel

#11. 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

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

Ayn Rand

#13. 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

#14. 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

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

Ayn Rand

#16. 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

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

Ellen Kenner