Top 100 Quotes About Ayn
#1. If Ayn Rand were an up-and-coming author today, she wouldn't write about steel or railroads, it would be Net Neutrality.
Mark Cuban
#2. Live your life somewhere in between Ayn Rand and Mother Theresa. It's just as important to better yourself as it is to better others.
Gregor Collins
#3. Ludwig von Mises referred to Ayn Rand as 'the most courageous man in America.' If that doesn't say it all about the economist's man-centric frame of reference, I don't know what does.
Ilana Mercer
#4. I would say that my position is not too far from that of Ayn Rand's; that I would like to see government reduced to no more than internal police and courts, external armed forces
with the other matters handled otherwise. I'm sick of the way the government sticks its nose into everything now.
Robert A. Heinlein
#5. I know these are going to sound like school reading-list suggestions, but if you like dystopian fiction, you should check out some of the originals: 'Anthem,' by Ayn Rand; '1984,' by George Orwell; or 'Brave New World,' by Aldous Huxley.
Sara Shepard
#6. Ayn Rand more than anyone else did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism.
Paul Ryan
#8. Even the outright deletions that Ayn Rand's editor should have taken care of).
Anna Quindlen
#9. Being wealthy gives them the option to live what author/philosopher Ayn Rand called "an unrestricted existence." This means having the ability to do what they want, when they want, with whom they want, for as long as they want, without limitations.
Steve Siebold
#10. It is not in a woman's best interest to rule man. I don't believe any good women would want that position. - Ayn Rand
Brooke Bida
#11. The young, Ayn Randish Republican that I was, discounted Vonnegut as one of them: A former hippie, maybe, or a proto-hippie, someone who, unlike me, wasn't earnest/tough/focused enough to be huge, classic, and utterly pure.
George Saunders
#12. I've always been influenced by the human form. I'm a big fan of that Shakespeare quote. I tend to leave out the bad part of the paragon of animals quote, because I have this sort of Ayn Rand aesthetic. It was always one of those quotes that inspired me.
Zack Snyder
#13. ...a very costly simplicity, one can notice, but not the elegance of a woman who gives much thought to her clothes; rather that of one who knows she can make any rag attractive and does it unconsciously."
Excerpt From: Ayn Rand. "Night of January 16th.
Ayn Rand
#14. She [Ayn Rand] had to declare that....altruism was despicable, that only self-interest is good and noble. (About Ayn Rand)
William F. Buckley Jr.
#15. When I was younger, I was drawn to Ayn Rand books and other works of fiction celebrating individualism.
David Harsanyi
#16. The thing for me about Ayn Rand is that her philosophy is the only one applicable to the world today - in every sense. If you take her ideas, then take them farther in your own mind, you can find answers to pretty well everything on an individual basis.
Neil Peart
#17. The thing I want you to understand," Ayn was saying, "is that no matter how hard the battle, it can be won. You can break through.
Nathaniel Branden
#18. The problem isn't reading Ayn Rand, it's liking her.
Lisa Lutz
#19. Perry wanted to be the villain, probably for strategic reasons. But it didn't take. He wasn't smart enough; he probably didn't even know how "Ayn" was pronounced.
Chuck Klosterman
#20. (LuAnn) Whatever. That'll teach me not to build my life around a man whose favorite book is Atlas Shrugged. Listen, kid." She waggles her finger, as if scolding me. "Nothing good comes from Ayn RAnd. Trust me on this.
Abby McDonald
#21. Ayn Rand is a rhetorician who writes novels I have never been able to read.
Gore Vidal
#22. Can someone explain the vitriol whenever Ayn Rand comes up? 'Atlas' is the greatest motivator for the individual that I can imagine.
Rob Lowe
#23. 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
#24. Don't try to talk anyone out of concentrating his hatred on Ayn Rand or any other dead person. It can't harm the dead. Diverted to a living person, it might actually do harm.
John McCarthy
#25. Ayn Rand called her novella Anthem a "hymn to man's ego." My approach to Anthem the play was to provide the story a further dimension through music and sound. The work is now larger than a hymn. It's really "spoken opera."
Jeff Britting
#26. Remember, Alan Greenspan was a member of Ayn Rand's collective. To understand this is to understand why we are doomed with the Federal Reserve.
Peter Fonda
#27. In the original novel [ Anthem], the story unfolds in the mind of a single character. Maybe that's why Ayn Rand called the work a poem.
Jeff Britting
#28. 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
#29. It is surely gratuitous to point out that the author suffered from an edifice complex (writing of Ayn Rand)
Claudia Roth Pierpont
#30. Every stylish man should have a copy of 'The Fountainhead' by Ayn Rand on his bookshelf.
Orlando Bloom
#31. The dining hall in our section of campus was like something out of an Ayn Rand novel: big, utilitarian, and impersonal.
Kirstie Collins Brote
#32. What books didn't influence me? If only someone would ask that! I've been waiting for years to answer it. Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, I will say, had absolutely no influence on me except to cause hours of incredulous boredom.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#33. Before I met Ayn Rand, I was a logical positivist, and accordingly, I didn't believe in absolutes, moral or otherwise. If I couldn't prove a proposition with facts and figures, it was without merit.
Alan Greenspan
#34. One of the methods used by statists to destroy capitalism consists in establishing controls that tie a given industry hand and foot, making it unable to solve its problems, then declaring that freedom has failed and stronger controls are necessary.=Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. Paull has his own style, which is folksy, not canned.
Religion? He's got one. His prophet's Ayn Rand.
By Rand's eerie theories he's fervently gripped,
So he won't do flip-flops. He long ago flipped.
Calvin Trillin
#39. 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
#40. The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand. The fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.
Paul Ryan
#41. Ayn Rand brings the best and the worst animal instinct out in humans. Well, excuse me, I aspire to be further evolved ethically than that. I really believe that Ayn Rand is the Marilyn Monroe of philosophy--all seduction, little substance.
John Stuart
#42. Most of Ayn Rand's major characters are already formed at the start of the stories.
Jeff Britting
#43. Before Ayn Rand coined the term "objectivists", we just called them "selfish assholes".
James Rozoff
#44. The anti-individualist enemies that Ayn Rand battled are still the enemy, but they've shifted their line of attack. Political collectivists are no longer much interested in taking things away from the wealthy and creative.
P. J. O'Rourke
#45. It so happens that America, according to all the polls that are out there, is pretty progressive. So you're not going to see messages that support Ayn Randian individualism at the cost of the whole, because most people don't agree with that.
Adam McKay
#46. The sight of an achievement is the greatest gift a human being could offer others. - AYN RAND
Robin S. Sharma
#47. If somebody is going to try to paste a person's view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas. Don't give me Ayn Rand.
Paul Ryan
#48. I think Republicans need to have their staffers reading less Ayn Rand and having them read Dr. Viktor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning more.
Rob Zerban
#50. But the trouble is that he [Alan Greenspan] had been an Ayn Rander. You can take the boy out of the cult but you can't take the cult out of the boy.
Paul Samuelson
#51. I think I view the system the same way that Ayn Rand views the system - that it really oppresses those that create, if you will, and tries to take away from those that produce and give to the non-producers.
Gary Johnson
#52. 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
#53. Nick chided a censor, who wished some books gone, and suggested she scan Fahrenheit 451. For the book-budget cutters, Old Claus had no plan, cause if they could read, they just read Ayn Rand.
David Davis
#54. Of all Americans who have appeared on the nation's postage stamps, Ayn Rand is probably the only one to have thought that the United States government has no business delivering mail.
Thomas Mallon
#55. I think Ayn Rand did the best job of anybody to build a moral case of capitalism, and that morality of capitalism is under assault.
Paul Ryan
#56. 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
#57. For nearly a decade Democrats have sought a religious wedge issue that could separate big chunks of white evangelical voters from their Republican home. Now they've found it, and are thrusting at the Social Darwinist/Ayn Rand underbelly of American conservatism.
Marvin Olasky
#58. I read all of Ayn Rand's novels when I was 17.
Rand Paul
#59. My Stephen King for his Ayn Rand. My Terry Goodkind for his T.S. Elliot. Not a bang but a whimper.
Shannon Celebi
#60. [If Republicans] got to put their kids into public school. They got to take public health. They would become libertarian faster than you could say Ayn Rand.
Greg Gutfeld
#61. I tend to really be partial to Ayn Rand, and to The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.
Clarence Thomas
#62. It's arguable that Ayn Rand's finest achievement was crashing the economy twenty-five years after her death.
Jarett Kobek
#63. Read (or listen to on CD) Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand This book is a fictional cautionary tale of what would happen if the most ambitious, innovative thinkers were no longer rewarded for using their minds to help advance society.
Steve Siebold
#64. I grew up reading Ayn Rand and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are, and what my beliefs are.
Paul Ryan
#65. Some major writers have a huge impact, like Ayn Rand, who to my mind is a lousy fiction writer because her writing has no compassion and virtually no humor. She has a philosophical and economical message that she is passing off as fiction, but it really isn't fiction at all.
Theodore Sturgeon
#66. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another - their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.
Ayn Rand
#67. When you force a man to act against his own choice and judgment, it's his thinking that you want him to suspend. You want him to become a robot.
Ayn Rand
#68. It is here, it exists - but one must enter it naked and alone, with no rags from the falsehoods of centuries, with the purest clarity of mind - not an innocent heart, but that which is much rarer: an intransigent mind - as one's only possession and key.
Ayn Rand
#69. Indifference to me, is the epitome of all evil.
Elie Wiesel
#70. I write - and read - for the sake of the story ... My basic test for any story is: 'Would I want to meet these characters and observe these events in real life? Is this story an experience worth living through for its own sake? Is the pleasure of contemplating these characters an end itself?
Ayn Rand
#71. You give them what they profess to like in public. I give them what they really like.
Ayn Rand
#72. If some men are entitled by right to the products of the work of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labor.
Ayn Rand
#73. Professional intellectuals are the voice of a culture and are, therefore, its leaders, its integrators and its bodyguards.
Ayn Rand
#74. 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
#75. I win by means of nothing but logic and I surrender to nothing but logic. I do not surrender my reason or deal with men who surrender theirs.
Ayn Rand
#76. It's the masters who despise the slaves, and the slaves who hate the masters. I don't know who is which. Maybe it doesn't fit here. Maybe it does. I don't know
Ayn Rand
#77. The ladder of success is best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity.
Ayn Rand
#78. She drove fast, as a matter of habit, an even speed without a sense of haste.
Ayn Rand
#79. A morality that holds need as a claim, holds emptiness-non-existence-as its standard of value; it rewards an absence, a defect: weakness, inability, incompetence, suffering, disease, disaster, the lack, the fault, the flaw-the zero.
Ayn Rand
#80. Oh, but I am quite resigned to taking second place in the shadow of my husband. I am humbly aware that the wife of a great man has to be contented with reflected glory - don't you think so Miss Taggart?"
"No," said Dagny, "I don't.
Ayn Rand
#81. For the first time since her return, she felt pain, a violent pain, but it made her feel alive, because it was worth feeling.
Ayn Rand
#82. If you want to save capitalism there is only one type of argument that you should adopt, the only one that has ever won in any moral issue: the argument from self-esteem. Check your premises, convince yourself of the rightness of your cause, then fight for capitalism with full, moral certainty.
Ayn Rand
#83. We the Living is not a novel 'about Soviet Russia.' It is a novel about Man against the State. Its basic theme is the sanctity of human life - using the word 'sanctity' not in a mystical sense, but in the sense of 'supreme value.'
Ayn Rand
#84. There is fear hanging in the air of the sleeping halls, and the air of the streets. Fear walks through the city, fear without name, without shape. All men feel it and none dare speak.
Ayn Rand
#85. Capitalism is based on individual rights - not on the sacrifice of the individual to the 'public good' of the collective.
Ayn Rand
#86. One must differentiate between one's thoughts and one's emotions with full clarity and precision ... No discussion, cooperation, agreement, or understanding is possible among men who substitute emotion for proof.
Ayn Rand
#87. There's something in me that knows of a life I've never lived, the kind of a life no one has ever lived, but should." "You know it? Why don't you live it?
Ayn Rand
#88. But we, Equality 7-2521, are glad to be living. If this is a vice, then we wish no virtue.
Ayn Rand
#89. Man who rules the mob only as long as he says what the mob wants him to say.
Ayn Rand
#90. She sat looking at him as she always did; her glance had tenderness without scorn and sadness without pity.
Ayn Rand
#91. Ask yourself what it is that a code of moral values does to a man's life, and why he can't exist without it, and what happens to him if he accepts the wrong standard, by which the evil is the good.
Ayn Rand
#92. There was so calm, so natural, so total a certainty in the sound of her voice that the mere sound seemed to carry an immense persuasiveness.
Ayn Rand
#93. Parties are intended to be celebrations, and celebrations should be only for those who have something to celebrate.
Ayn Rand
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. She had been proved right so eloquently, she had thought, that comments were unnecessary.
Ayn Rand
#97. I don't want to fight for the people, I don't want to fight against the people, I don't want to hear of the people. I want to be left alone - to live.
Ayn Rand
#98. 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
#99. Action without thought is mindlessness, and thought without action is hypocritical.
Ayn Rand
#100. Instead of prosperity, socialism has brought economic paralysis and/or collapse to every country that tried it. The degree of socialization has been the degree of disaster. The consequences have varied accordingly.
Ayn Rand
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