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Ayn Rand Quotes
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Ayn Rand was a Russian-American writer and philosopher. She is known for her two best-selling novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and for developing a philosophical system she named Objectivism. Educated in Russia, she moved to the United States in 1926. She had a play produced on Broadway in 1935 and 1936. After two early novels that were initially unsuccessful, she achieved fame with her 1943 novel, The Fountainhead. In 1957, Rand published her best-known work, the novel Atlas Shrugged. Afterward, she turned to non-fiction to promote her philosophy, publishing her own periodicals and releasing several collections of essays until her death in 1982.

Rand advocated reason as the only means of acquiring knowledge and rejected faith and religion. She supported rational and ethical egoism and rejected altruism. In politics, she condemned the initiation of force as immoral and opposed collectivism and statism as well as anarchism, instead supporting laissez-faire capitalism, which she defined as the system based on recognizing individual rights, including property rights. In art, Rand promoted romantic realism. She was sharply critical of most philosophers and philosophical traditions known to her, except for Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and classical liberals.Literary critics received Rand's fiction with mixed reviews and academia generally ignored or rejected her philosophy, though academic interest has increased in recent decades. The Objectivist movement attempts to spread her ideas, both to the public and in academic settings. She has been a significant influence among libertarians and American conservatives. Wikipedia  

✵ 2. February 1905 – 6. March 1982  •  Other names Ayn Randová, Ann Rand
Ayn Rand photo
Ayn Rand: 322 quotes39 likes

Ayn Rand Quotes

“Do you mean to tell me that you're thinking seriously of building, when and if you are an architect?”
“Yes.”
“My dear fellow, who will let you?”
“That’s not the point. The point is, who will stop me?”

Ayn Rand book The Fountainhead

Source: The Fountainhead

“Self respect is something that can't be killed. The worst thing is to kill a man's pretense at it.”

Ayn Rand book The Fountainhead

Source: The Fountainhead

“In this world, either you're virtuous or you enjoy yourself. Not both, lady, not both.”

Ayn Rand book Atlas Shrugged

Source: Atlas Shrugged

“One loses everything when one loses one's sense of humor.”

Ayn Rand book The Fountainhead

Source: The Fountainhead

“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 book Atlas Shrugged

Source: Atlas Shrugged

“Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be left waiting for us in our graves-or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.”

Ayn Rand book Atlas Shrugged

Source: Atlas Shrugged

“Within the extent of your knowledge, you are right.”

Ayn Rand

“But you see, the measure of hell you're able to endure is the measure of your love.”

Ayn Rand book Atlas Shrugged

Source: Atlas Shrugged

“Never ask people about your work.”

Ayn Rand book The Fountainhead

Source: The Fountainhead

“He liked to observe emotions; they were like red lanterns strung along the dark unknown of another's personality, marking vulnerable points.”

Ayn Rand book Atlas Shrugged

Source: Atlas Shrugged

“I don't wish to be the symbol of anything. I'm only myself.”

Ayn Rand book The Fountainhead

Source: The Fountainhead

“She thought how strange it would be if she ever said 'Hello' to him. One did not greet oneself each morning.”

Ayn Rand book The Fountainhead

Source: The Fountainhead

“What is morality, she asked.
Judgement to distinguish right and wrong, vision to see the truth, and courage to act upon it, dedication to that which is good, integrity to stand by the good at any price.”

Ayn Rand book Atlas Shrugged

Source: Atlas Shrugged

“Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's individual value-judgments.”

Ayn Rand book The Fountainhead

Source: The Romantic Manifesto (1969), Chapter 1 ("The Psycho-Epistemology of Art")
Source: The Fountainhead

“The most depraved type of human being… (is) the man without a purpose.”

Ayn Rand book Atlas Shrugged

Variant: Fransisco, what's the most depraved type of human being?

-The man without purpose.
Source: Atlas Shrugged

“It is not advisable to venture unsolicited opinions. You should spare yourself the embarrassing discovery of their exact value to your listener.”

Ayn Rand book Atlas Shrugged

Source: Atlas Shrugged

“Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants.”

Ayn Rand book Atlas Shrugged

Source: Atlas Shrugged

“Is it advisable to spread out all the conveniences of culture before people to whom a few steps up a stair to a library is a sufficient deterrent from reading?”

Ayn Rand book The Fountainhead

Source: The Fountainhead

“It's not that I don't suffer, it's that I know the unimportance of suffering. I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one's soul and as a permanent scar across one's view of existence.”

Ayn Rand book Atlas Shrugged

Source: Atlas Shrugged

“The man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.”

Ayn Rand book Atlas Shrugged

Source: Atlas Shrugged

“Every form of happiness is private. Our greatest moments are personal, self-motivated, not to be touched".”

Ayn Rand book The Fountainhead

Source: The Fountainhead

“In a free society, one does not have to deal with those who are irrational. One is free to avoid them.”

Ayn Rand

Source: The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism

“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

“Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.”

Ayn Rand

“But there are people who'll try to hurt you through the good they see in you--knowing that it's the good, needing it and punishing you for it. Don't let it break you when you discover that.”

Ayn Rand book Atlas Shrugged

Source: Atlas Shrugged

“People want nothing but mirrors around them. To reflect them while they’re reflecting too… Reflections of reflections and echoes of echoes. No beginning and no end. No center and no purpose.”

Ayn Rand book The Fountainhead

Source: The Fountainhead

“Don't think. Believe. Trust your heart, not your brain. Don't think. Feel. Believe.”

Ayn Rand book The Fountainhead

Source: The Fountainhead

“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 book The Fountainhead

Source: The Fountainhead

“Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.”

Ayn Rand book The Fountainhead

Source: The Fountainhead

“The worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt.”

Ayn Rand

“Toohey: "Mr. Roark, we're alone here. Why don't you tell me what you think of me? In any words you wish. No one will hear us."
Roark: "But I don't think of you.”

Ayn Rand book The Fountainhead

Source: The Fountainhead

“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 book Atlas Shrugged

Source: Atlas Shrugged

“I don't want to see you. I don't like you. I don't like your face. You look like an insufferable egotist. You're impertinent. You're too sure of yourself. Twenty years ago I would have punched your face with the greatest of pleasure.”

Ayn Rand book The Fountainhead

Source: The Fountainhead

“I think. I am. I will.”

Ayn Rand book Anthem

Variant: I am. I think. I will.
Source: Anthem (1937)

“Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.”

Ayn Rand

“Worry is a waste of emotional reserve".”

Ayn Rand book The Fountainhead

Source: The Fountainhead

“A rational man never distorts or corrupts his own standards and judgment in order to appeal to the irrationality, stupidity, or dishonesty of others.”

Ayn Rand

“Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer—and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.”

Ayn Rand

The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)
Source: The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism

“The more you learn, the more you know that you know nothing.”

Ayn Rand

“There are no evil thoughts except one; the refusal to think.”

Ayn Rand

Variant: There are no evil thoughts, Mr. Rearden," Francisco said softly, "except one: the refusal to think.
Source: Atlas Shrugged: Wer Ist John Galt?

“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 book The Fountainhead

Source: The Fountainhead

“Do it first and feel about it afterwards.' - Dagny Taggart”

Ayn Rand book Atlas Shrugged

Source: Atlas Shrugged

“every man is free to rise as far as he's able or willing, but the degree to which he thinks determines the degree to which he'll rise.”

Ayn Rand