Ayn Rand Quotes page 3

“A man's ego is the fountainhead of human progress.”

Source: Atlas Shrugged

“I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone's right to one minute of my life.”

“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.”

“When you are asked to love everybody indiscriminately, that is to love people without any standard, to love them regardless of whether they have any value or virtue, you are asked to love nobody.”

“My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”

“Anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today.”

Ayn Rand book The Romantic Manifesto

The Romantic Manifesto (1969)

“If the rest of them can survive only by destroying us, then why should we wish them to survive?… Nothing can make it moral to destroy the best. One can't be punished for being good. One can't be penalized for ability.”

“Every loneliness is a pinnacle”

Source: Atlas Shrugged

“The freedom of speech of private individuals includes the right to not agree, not to listen, and not to finance one's own antagonists.”

Source: The Fountainhead

“But what man does out of despair, is not necessarily a key to his character. I have always thought that the real key is in that which he seeks for his enjoyment.”

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

“The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.”

“Only a man of integrity can possess the virtue of honesty, since only the faking of one’s consciousness can permit the faking of existence.”

Source: The Fountainhead

“We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.”

Source: The Journals of Ayn Rand

“Place nothing above the verdict of your own mind.”

Variant: We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality

“Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think.”

“She thought: at this moment, the glass stem between his fingers feels just like the one between mine. We have this much in common.”

“Any work is creative work if done by a thinking mind.”

Source: The Fountainhead

“In order to deal with reality successfully - to pursue and achieve the values which his life requires - man needs self-esteem; he needs to be confident of his efficacy and worth.”

Source: Atlas Shrugged

“Compromise now, because you'll have to later, anyway, only then you'll have gone through things you'll wish you hadn't.”

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

“There can be no compromise on moral principles.”

Source: The Fountainhead

“When I die, I hope to go to Heaven, whatever the Hell that is.”

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

“If you write a line of zeroes, it´s still nothing.”

Variant: When I die I hope to go to heaven--whatever that is--and I want to be able to afford the price of admission.
Source: Atlas Shrugged

Ayn Rand book We the Living

Source: We the Living

“The world you desire can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.”

“She knew that even pain can be confessed, but to confess happiness is to stand naked, delivered to the witness, yet they could let each other see it without the need of protection.”

“Why no. I’m too conceited. If you want to call it that. I don’t make
comparisons. I never think of myself in relation to anyone else. I just refuse
to measure myself as part of anything. I’m an utter egotist.”

Source: The Fountainhead

“Genius is an exaggeration of dimension. So is elephantiasis. Both may be only a disease.”

Source: The Fountainhead

“We are born into this world unarmed - our mind is our only weapon.”

Source: The Fountainhead

“I am, therefore I'll think”

Source: Atlas Shrugged

“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.”

Variant: I think, therefore I'll think.
Source: Atlas Shrugged

Ayn Rand book Anthem

Source: Anthem

“I understood that centuries of chains and lashes will not kill the spirit of man nor the sense of truth within him.”

Ayn Rand book Anthem

Source: Anthem

“Love is our response to our highest values, and can be nothing else.”

“A house can have integrity, just like a person,' said Roark, 'and just as seldom.”

“She knew that she could not have reached this white serenity except as the sum of all the colors, of all the violence she had known.”

Variant: A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.
Source: The Fountainhead

“We'll meet again. We'll meet when years have passed, and years make such a difference, don't they?”

Source: The Fountainhead

Ayn Rand book We the Living

Source: We the Living

“Have you noticed that the imbecile always smiles? Man's first frown is the first touch of God on his forehead. The touch of thought.”

“Everyone has the right to make his own decisions, but none has the right to force his decision on others.”

Source: The Fountainhead

“I dont work with collectives. I don't consult, i don't co-operate, I don't collaborate.”

Source: The Early Ayn Rand: A Selection from Her Unpublished Fiction

“This miracle of me is mine to own and keep, and mine to guard, and mine to use, and mine to kneel before…The fortune of my spirit is not to be blown into coins of brass and flung to the winds as alms for the poor of spirit.”

Source: The Fountainhead

Ayn Rand book Anthem

Source: Anthem (1937)

“There are no contradictions. If you find one, check your premises.”

“Don't worry. They're all against me. But I have one advantage: they don't know what they want. I do.”

Source: Atlas Shrugged

“She did not know what it was about him that had always made her want to see him broken.”

Source: The Fountainhead

“This is pity,” he thought, and then he lifted his head in wonder. He thought that there must be something terribly wrong with a world in which this monstrous feeling is called a virtue.”

Source: The Fountainhead

“Because I never have any definite destination. This ship is not for going to places, but for getting away from them. When I stop at a port, it's only for the sheer pleasure of leaving it. I always think: here's one more place that can't hold me.”

Source: The Fountainhead

“If you know that this life is all that you have, wouldn't you make the most of it?”

“Never ask people. Not about your work. Don't you know what you want? How can you stand it, not to know?”

“Every form of happiness if one, every desire is driven by the same motor--by our love for a single value, for the highest potentiality of our own existence--and every achievement is an expression of it.”

Source: The Fountainhead

“Tell me what a person finds sexually attractive and I will tell you their entire philosophy of life. Show me the person they sleep with and I will tell you their valuation of themselves.”

“There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.”

Ayn Rand book The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

Source: The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1971), p. 123

“I've always thought that a feeling which changes never existed in the first place.”