Ayn Rand: Trending quotes

“Pity for the guilty is treason to the innocent.”

“Why do they always teach us that it's easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It's the hardest thing in the world--to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want.”

“A leash is a rope with a noose at both ends.”

“I could die for you. But I couldn't, and wouldn't, live for you.”

“Don't think of them now. Never think of pain or danger or enemies a moment longer than is necessary to fight them. You're here. It's our time and our life, not theirs. Don't struggle not to be happy. You are."

- John Gault”

“Have you felt it too? Have you seen how your best friends love everything about you- except the things that count? And your most important is nothing to them; nothing, not even a sound they can recognize.”

“Any group or “collective,” large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members.”

“When the common good of a society is regarded as something apart from and superior to the individual good of its members, it means that the good of some men takes precedence over the good of others, with those others consigned to the status of sacrificial animals.”

“For the coming of that day shall I fight, I and my sons and my chosen friends. For the freedom of Man. For his rights. For his life. For his honor.”

“… 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?”

“So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of all money?”

“A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.”

“There is no such thing as duty. If you know that a thing is right, you want to do it. If you don't want to do it—it isn't right. If it's right and you don't want to do it—you don't know what right is and you're not a man.”

“Learn to value yourself, which means: fight for your happiness.”

“Man—every man—is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others; he must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; he must work for his rational self-interest, with the achievement of his own happiness as the highest moral purpose of his life.”

“There is nothing to take a man's freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers.”

“The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see.”

“I worship individuals for their highest possibilities as individuals and I loathe humanity for its failure to live up to these possibilities.”

“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.”