Ayn Rand (1905–82,) born Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, was a Russian-born American novelist, philosopher, and screenwriter.
Born to Jewish parents in St. Petersburg, Ayn witnessed the first shots of the Russian Revolution from her balcony in 1917 and suffered the brutality of the Soviet regime. After college, Rand worked as a guide in a historical museum, but when she got a visa to visit relatives in Chicago in 1926, she vowed never to return to Russia.
Rand soon moved to Hollywood, got a job as an extra in films, and then as a script reader. She sold a few screenplays and a stage play. In 1936, her autobiographical novel, We the Living, was published to mediocre reviews. The Fountainhead (1943) brought Rand international fame, and Atlas Shrugged (1957) sealed this fame.
In these novels, Rand elaborated a philosophical system she called “Objectivism,” that favored the pursuit of rational self-interest, individualism, and laissez-faire capitalism. She asserted that individuals have a moral duty to be selfish, and altruism or self-sacrifice is immoral. Rand’s philosophy has been and continues to be a significant influence on the libertarian movement, especially in the United States.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Ayn Rand
Mediocrity doesn’t mean average intelligence, it means an average intelligence that resents and envies its betters.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Envy
Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men’s stupidity, but your talent to their reason.
—Ayn Rand
Only the man who does not need it is fit to inherit wealth, the man who would make his fortune no matter where he started.
—Ayn Rand
Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.
—Ayn Rand
Man has the power to act as his own destroyer—and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.
—Ayn Rand
Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Happiness
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
Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Charity, Living, Giving
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
Topics: Knowledge
Guilt is a rope that wears thin.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Guilt, One liners
The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Morals, Morality
Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Wealth
We cannot fight against anything, unless we fight for something — and what we must fight for is the supremacy of reason, and a view of man as a rational being.
—Ayn Rand
The desire not to be anything is the desire not to be.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Desire, Life
Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.
—Ayn Rand
Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won. It exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.
—Ayn Rand
Envy is the only name she could find for the monstrous thing she faced, but it was much worse than envy: it was the profound hatred of life, of success and of all human values, felt by a certain kind of mediocrity…the kind who feels pleasure on hearing about a stranger’s misfortune. It was hatred of the good for being the good…hatred of ability, of beauty, of honesty, of earnestness, of achievement and, above all, of human joy.
—Ayn Rand
It is the metaphysically given that must be accepted: it cannot be changed.It is the man-made that must never be accepted uncritically: it must be judged, then accepted or rejected and changed when necessary.
—Ayn Rand
You’ll come back, because yours is an error of knowledge, not a moral failure, not an act of surrender to evil, but only the last act of being victim to your own virtue. We’ll wait for you and when you come back, you will have discovered that there need never be any conflict among your desires, nor so tragic a clash of values as the one you’ve borne so well.
—Ayn Rand
I’m working to improve my methods, and every hour I save is an hour added to my life.
—Ayn Rand
Every man builds his world in his own image; he has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice. If he abdicates his power, he abdicates the status of man, and the grinding chaos of the irrational is what he achieves as his sphere of existence by his own choice.
—Ayn Rand
A government is the most dangerous threat to man’s rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Government
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Isaac Asimov American Novelist, Critic, Popular Scientist
Vladimir Nabokov Russian-born American Novelist
Gore Vidal American Novelist
Igor Stravinsky Russian-born American Composer
Vladimir Horowitz Russian-born American Pianist
Leo Rosten Russian-born American Humorist
Joyce Carol Oates American Novelist
Bernard Berenson Russian-born American Art Historian
Anita Loos American Actor
Philip Roth American Novelist, Short-story Writer