Top 100 Quotes About Ayn

#1. 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

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#2. 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

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#3. 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

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

Elie Wiesel

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#5. 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

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#6. You give them what they profess to like in public. I give them what they really like.

Ayn Rand

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#7. 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

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

Ayn Rand

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#9. 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

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#10. 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

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#11. 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

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

Ayn Rand

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#13. She drove fast, as a matter of habit, an even speed without a sense of haste.

Ayn Rand

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#14. 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

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#15. 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

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#16. 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

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#17. 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

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#18. 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

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#19. 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

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#20. Capitalism is based on individual rights - not on the sacrifice of the individual to the 'public good' of the collective.

Ayn Rand

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#21. 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

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#22. 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

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#23. But we, Equality 7-2521, are glad to be living. If this is a vice, then we wish no virtue.

Ayn Rand

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#24. Man who rules the mob only as long as he says what the mob wants him to say.

Ayn Rand

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#25. She sat looking at him as she always did; her glance had tenderness without scorn and sadness without pity.

Ayn Rand

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#26. 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

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#27. 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

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#28. Parties are intended to be celebrations, and celebrations should be only for those who have something to celebrate.

Ayn Rand

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#29. 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

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#30. 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

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#31. She had been proved right so eloquently, she had thought, that comments were unnecessary.

Ayn Rand

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#32. 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

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#33. 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

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#34. Action without thought is mindlessness, and thought without action is hypocritical.

Ayn Rand

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#35. 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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#36. The hours ahead, like all her nights with him, would be added, she thought, to that savings account of one's life where moments of time are stored in the pride of having been lived.

Ayn Rand

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#37. A right doesn't include the material implementation of that right by other men;
it includes only the freedom to earn that implementation by one's own effort.

Ayn Rand

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#38. There were things in my past which I have not liked. But all the things of which I was proud will remain.

Ayn Rand

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#39. When you violate the rights of one man, you have violated the rights of all, and a public of rightless creatures is doomed to destruction.

Ayn Rand

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#40. 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

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#41. 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

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#42. It is forbidden, not to be happy. For, as it has been explained to us, men are free and the earth belongs to them; and all things on earth belong to all men; and the will of all men together is good for all; and so all men must be happy. Yet

Ayn Rand

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#43. The man without a purpose is a man who drifts at the mercy of random feelings or unidentified urges and is capable of any evil, because he is totally out of control of his own life. In order to be in control of your life, you have to have a purpose-a productive purpose.

Ayn Rand

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#44. Honor is self-esteem made visible in action.

Ayn Rand

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#45. Beauty is a sense of harmony.

Ayn Rand

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

Ayn Rand

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#47. 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

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#48. If he can give his readers no reason why they should read his book, except that the events happened to him, it is not a valid book.

Ayn Rand

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#49. Say, do you know that gorgeous creature over there?

Ayn Rand

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#50. Let no man posture as an advocate of peace if he proposes or supports any social system that initiates the use of force against individual men, in any form.

Ayn Rand

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#51. A society without intellectuals is like a body without a head

Ayn Rand

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#52. If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.

Ayn Rand

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#53. I agree that [marriage] should be treated like a business deal. But every business deal has to have its own terms and its own kind of currency.

Ayn Rand

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#54. 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.

Ayn Rand

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#55. It was not a silence of resentment; it was the silence of an understanding too delicate to limit by words.

Ayn Rand

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

Ayn Rand

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#57. The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.

Ayn Rand

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#58. 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.

Ayn Rand

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#59. Men hate passion, any great passion. Henry Cameron made a mistake: he loved his work. That was why he fought. That was why he lost.

Ayn Rand

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#60. We will not deal with men on any terms but ours - and our terms are a moral code which holds that man is an end in himself and not the means to any end of others. We do not seek to force our code upon them. They are free to believe what they please.

Ayn Rand

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#61. A gracefully effortless floating, flowing and flying are the essentials of the ballet's image of man.

Ayn Rand

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#62. ... if the majority of men cannot know what is good for them, each for himself, how can they know what is good for others by proxy? If they are to be controlled by specialists, how and by what standard can they choose the specialist?

Ayn Rand

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#63. 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

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#64. The structures were austere and simple, until one looked at them and realized what work, what complexity of method, what tension of thought had achieved the simplicity.

Ayn Rand

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#65. And now, sitting here in our tunnel, we wonder about these words. It is forbidden, not to be happy.

Ayn Rand

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#66. It is morally obscene to regard wealth as an anonymous, tribal product and to talk about 'redistributing' it.

Ayn Rand

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#67. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.

Ayn Rand

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#68. No speech is ever considered, but only the speaker. It's so much easier to pass judgement on a man than on an idea.

Ayn Rand

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#69. 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

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#70. Just as man can't exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one's rights into reality, to think, to work and keep the results, which means: the right of property.

Ayn Rand

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#71. 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

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#72. It is a free market that makes monopolies impossible.

Ayn Rand

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#73. I love doing it. Every building is like a person. Single and unrepeatable.

Ayn Rand

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#74. 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.

Ayn Rand

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#75. Great men can't be ruled ... The great is the rare, the difficult, the exceptional.

Ayn Rand

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#76. I am not morally obligated to care more for a man than he cares for himself.

Ayn Rand

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#77. The moral absolute should be: if and when, in any dispute, one side initiates the use of physical force, that side is wrong - and no consideration or discussion of the issues is necessary or appropriate.

Ayn Rand

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#78. (I really believe that a building is a unit, not a city, so that city planning should not control all buildings. Because a house can be the product of one man, but a city cannot. And nothing collective can have the unity and integrity of a "unit.")

Ayn Rand

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

Ayn Rand

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#80. The fields are black and ploughed, and they lie like a great fan before us, with their furrows gathered in some hand beyond the sky, spreading forth from that hand, opening wide apart as they come toward us, like black pleats that sparkle with thin, green spangles.

Ayn Rand

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#81. He looked at the paper before him. He wondered why ineptitude should exist and have its say.

Ayn Rand

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#82. This sense of eagerness, of hope and of secret excitement. It was as if normal existence were a photograph of shapeless things in badly printed colors, but this was a sketch done in a few sharp strokes that made things seem clean, important - and worth doing.

Ayn Rand

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#83. The indignation was too sharp and raw for a mere piece of professional gossip; each man took it as a personal insult; each felt himself qualified to alter, advise and improve the work of any man living.

Ayn Rand

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#84. There are no defenders of man's mind - in the world's greatest scientific-technological civilization. All that is left is a battle between the mystics of spirit and the mystics of muscle - between men guided by their feelings and men guided by their reflexes.

Ayn Rand

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

Ayn Rand

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#86. An architect requires a great many men to erect his building. But he does not ask them to vote on his design.

Ayn Rand

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#87. In the temple of his spirit, each man is alone.

Ayn Rand

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#88. He hated stupidity. It was the only emotion I had ever seen him display toward people - a

Ayn Rand

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#89. The skyline of New York is a monument of a splendour that no pyramids or palaces will ever equal or approach.

Ayn Rand

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#90. Notice the malice toward an independent man. Look back at your own life. Howard, and at the people you've met. They know. They're afraid. You're a reproach.

Ayn Rand

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#91. The vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your existence.

Ayn Rand

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#92. 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

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#93. If you tell an ugly woman that she is beautiful, you offer her the great homage of corrupting the concept of beauty.

Ayn Rand

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#94. The theory that holds "good blood" or "bad blood" as a moral-intellectual criterion , can lead to nothing but torrents of blood in practice.

Ayn Rand

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#95. Whoever, to whatever purpose or extent, initiates the use of force, is a killer acting on the premise of death in a manner wider than murder: the premise of destroying man's capacity to live.

Ayn Rand

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#96. Of course I'm all right, professor. I had to be. A is A.- John Galt

Ayn Rand

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#97. You always play it open, don't you?" he asked.
"I've never noticed you doing otherwise."
"I thought I was the only one who could afford to.

Ayn Rand

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#98. A rational man knows-or makes it a point to discover-the source of his emotions, the basic premises from which they come.

Ayn Rand

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#99. A code that forbids you to cast the first stone, has forbidden you to admit the identity of stones and to know when or if you're being stoned.

Ayn Rand

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#100. The men of the press, who despised their own profession, did not know why they were enjoying it today. One of them, a young man with years of notorious success behind him and a cynical look of twice his age, said suddenly, 'I know what I'd like to be: I wish I could be a man who covers news!'

Ayn Rand

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