Ayn Rand Quotes (322 quotes, page 6) | Quotes of famous people

“An Asian peasant who labors through all of his waking hours, with tools created in Biblical times—a South American aborigine who is devoured by piranha in a jungle stream—an African who is bitten by the tsetse fly—an Arab whose teeth are green with decay in his mouth—these do live with their 'natural environment,' but are scarcely able to appreciate its beauty. Try to tell a Chinese mother, whose child is dying of cholera: 'Should one do everything one can? Of course not.' Try to tell a Russian housewife, who trudges miles on foot in sub-zero weather in order to spend hours standing in line at a state store dispensing food rations, that America is defiled by shopping centers, expressways and family cars.”

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

Source: The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1971), p. 88

Family , Food , Beauty , Cars

“The highest thing in a man is not his god. It's that in him which knows the reverence due a god. You are my highest reverence.”

Ayn Rand

We The Living (1936)
Source: We The Living Last Page

God

“A moment or an eternity—did it matter? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist. She smiled, her last smile, to so much that had been possible.”

Ayn Rand

We The Living (1936)

Life , Smile

“Even if smog were a risk to human life, we must remember that life in nature, without technology, is wholesale death.”

Ayn Rand

The Objectivist February 1971

Life , Death , Nature

“The only proper, moral purpose of a government is to protect man’s rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence—to protect his right to his own life, to his own liberty, to his own property and to the pursuit of his own happiness. Without property rights, no other rights are possible.”

Ayn Rand book The Virtue of Selfishness

The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

Life , Happiness

“It took centuries of intellectual, philosophical development to achieve political freedom. It was a long struggle, stretching from Aristotle to John Locke to the Founding Fathers. The system they established was not based on unlimited majority but on its opposite: on individual rights, which were not to be alienated by majority vote or minority plotting. The individual was not left at the mercy of his neighbors or his leaders: the Constitutional system of checks and balances was scientifically devised to protect him from both. This was the great American achievement—and if concern for the actual welfare of other nations were our present leaders' motive, this is what we should have been teaching the world. Instead, we are deluding the ignorant and the semi-savage by telling them that no political knowledge is necessary—that our system is only a matter of subjective preference—that any prehistorical form of tribal tyranny, gang rule, and slaughter will do just as well, with our sanction and support. It is thus that we encourage the spectacle of Algerian workers marching through the streets [in the 1962 Civil War] and shouting the demand: "Work, not blood!"—without knowing what great knowledge and virtue are required to achieve it. In the same way, in 1917, the Russian peasants were demanding: "Land and Freedom!" But Lenin and Stalin is what they got. In 1933, the Germans were demanding: "Room to live!" But what they got was Hitler. In 1793, the French were shouting: "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity!"”

Ayn Rand

What they got was Napoleon. In 1776, the Americans were proclaiming "The Rights of Man"—and, led by political philosophers, they achieved it. No revolution, no matter how justified, and no movement, no matter how popular, has ever succeeded without a political philosophy to guide it, to set its direction and goal.
The Ayn Rand Column

War , World , Way , Motivation

“And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride. This god, this one word: 'I.”

Ayn Rand book Anthem

Anthem (1937)

Men , God , Peace , Joy

“The right to vote is a consequence, not a primary cause, of a free social system—and its value depends on the constitutional structure implementing and strictly delimiting the voters' power; unlimited majority rule is an instance of the principle of tyranny.”

Ayn Rand

The Ayn Rand Letter (1971–1976)

Dependency

“What is greatness? I will answer: it is the capacity to live by the three fundamental values of John Galt: reason, purpose, self-esteem.”

Ayn Rand

Playboy Interview (March 1964)

“…observe that in all the propaganda of the ecologists—amidst all their appeals to nature and pleas for 'harmony with nature'—there is no discussion of man's needs and the requirements of his survival. Man is treated as if he were an unnatural phenomenon. Man cannot survive in the kind of state of nature that the ecologists envision—i. e., on the level of sea urchins or polar bears…”

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

Source: The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1971), p. 136

Nature , Sea

“Art is man’s metaphysical mirror; what a rational man seeks to see in that mirror is a salute; what an irrational man seeks to see is a justification – even if only a justification of his depravity, as a last convulsion of his betrayed self-esteem.”

Ayn Rand book The Romantic Manifesto

Source: The Romantic Manifesto (1969), Chapter 3 ("Art and Sense of Life")

Art

“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 book For the New Intellectual

For the New Intellectual

Men , Peace , Support

“The men who attempt to survive, not by means of reason, but by means of force, are attempting to survive by the method of animals.”

Ayn Rand book The Virtue of Selfishness

The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

Men , Animals

“The moral precept to adopt…is: Judge, and be prepared to be judged.”

Ayn Rand book The Virtue of Selfishness

The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

“Businessmen are the one group that distinguishes capitalism and the American way of life from the totalitarian statism that is swallowing the rest of the world. All the other social groups- workers, farmers, professional men, scientists, soldiers- exist under dictatorships, even though they exist in chains, in terror, in misery, and in progressive self-destruction. But there is no such group as businessmen under a dictatorship. Their place is taken by armed thugs: by bureaucrats and commissars. Businessmen are the symbol of a free society- the symbol of America.”

Ayn Rand book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966)

Life , Men , World , Way

“On second handers: [They are] always concerned with people - not facts, ideas, work or production. What would happen to the world without those who think, work, and produce?”

Ayn Rand

Journals of Ayn Rand (1997)

People , World , Idea , Thinking

““Free competition enforced by law” is a grotesque contradiction in terms.”

Ayn Rand

The Objectivist Newsletter “Antitrust: The Rule of Unreason,” The Objectivist Newsletter, Feb. 1962, 1

Law

“Above all, do not join the wrong ideological groups or movements, in order to “do something.” By “ideological” (in this context), I mean groups or movements proclaiming some vaguely generalized, undefined (and, usually, contradictory) political goals. (E. g., the Conservative Party, that subordinates reason to faith, and substitutes theocracy for capitalism; or the “libertarian” hippies, who subordinate reason to whims, and substitute anarchism for capitalism.) To join such groups means to reverse the philosophical hierarchy and to sell out fundamental principles for the sake of some superficial political action which is bound to fail.”

Ayn Rand

“What Can One Do?” The Ayn Rand Letter, Vol. 1, No. 7 (1972)

Faith

“Contrary to the ecologists, nature does not stand still and does not maintain the kind of equilibrium that guarantees the survival of any particular species - least of all the survival of her greatest and most fragile product: man.”

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

Source: The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1971), p. 134

Nature

“Honor is self-esteem made visible in action.”

Ayn Rand

The Ayn Rand Letter (1971–1976)

“Never demand of another that which would constitute his sacrifice to you. Never grant that which would constitute your sacrifice to him.”

Ayn Rand

Journals of Ayn Rand (1997)

“By the same principle, the government may not give special leniency to the perpetrator of a crime, on the grounds of the nature of his ideas.”

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

Source: The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1971), p. 99

Idea , Nature

“Do you believe in God, Andrei? No. Neither do I. But that's a favorite question of mine. An upside-down question, you know. What do you mean? Well, if I asked people whether they believed in life, they'd never understand what I meant. It's a bad question. It can mean so much that it really means nothing. So I ask them if they believe in God. And if they say they do—then, I know they don't believe in life. Why? Because, you see, God—whatever anyone chooses to call God—is one's highest conception of the highest possible. And whoever places his highest conception above his own possibility thinks very little of himself and his life. It's a rare gift, you know, to feel reverence for your own life and to want the best, the greatest, the highest possible, here, now, for your very own. To imagine a heaven and then not to dream of it, but to demand it.”

Ayn Rand

We The Living (1936)
Source: We The Living Part One Chapter 9

Life , God , People , Dreams

“A culture is made — or destroyed — by its articulate voices.”

Ayn Rand book The Voice of Reason

The Voice of Reason (1989)

“And this is the whole shabby secret: to some men, the sight of an achievement is a reproach, a reminder that their own lives are irrational, and that there is no loophole - no escape from reason and reality. Their resentment is the cornered Dionysian element baring its teeth.”

Ayn Rand

Apollo and Dionysus (1969)

Men , Secret , Reality

“Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman's tool is values; the bureaucrat's tool is fear.”

Ayn Rand book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966)

Men , Fear , Exercises

“Is there any doubt that drug addiction is an escape from an unbearable inner state - from a reality that one cannot deal with - from an atrophying mind one can never fully destroy? If Apollonian reason were unnatural to man, and Dionysian intuition brought him closer to nature and truth, the apostles of irrationality would not have to resort to drugs. Happy, self-confident men do not seek to get stoned. Drug addiction is the attempt to obliterate one's consciousness, the quest for a deliberately-induced insanity. As such, it is so obscene and evil that any doubt about the moral character of its practitioners is itself an obscenity.”

Ayn Rand

Apollo and Dionysus (1969)

Men , Truth , Confidence , Nature

“Ask yourself why totalitarian dictatorships find it necessary to pour money and effort into propaganda for their own helpless, chained, gagged slaves, who have no means of protest or defense. The answer is that even the humblest peasant or the lowest savage would rise in blind rebellion, were he to realize that he is being immolated, not to some incomprehensible noble purpose, but to plain, naked human evil.”

Ayn Rand book The Virtue of Selfishness

The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

Money , Effort , Evil

“The Arabs are one of the least developed cultures. They are typically nomads. Their culture is primitive, and they resent Israel because it's the sole beachhead of modern science and civilization on their continent. When you have civilized men fighting savages, you support the civilized men, no matter who they are.”

Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand Ford Hall Forum lecture, 1974, text published on the website of The Ayn Rand Institute http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=media_america_at_war_israeli_arab_conflict

Men , Support , Science , Fight

“So long as [men] hold the tribal notion that the individual is sacrificial fodder for the collective, that some men have the right to rule others by force, and that some (any) alleged 'good' can justify It — there can be no peace ‘within’ a nation and no peace among nations.”

Ayn Rand book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966)

Men , Peace

“I hope you will understand my hesitation in writing to one whom I admire as the greatest representative of a philosophy to which I want to dedicate my whole life.”

Ayn Rand

Letter to H.L. Mencken July 28, 1934.

Life , Hope , Understanding

“It is futile to fight against, if one does not know what one is fighting for.”

Ayn Rand book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966)