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
I would step in the way of a bullet if it were aimed at my husband. It is not self-sacrifice to die protecting that which you value: If the value is great enough, you do not care to exist without it.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Great
Believing in fate produces fate. Believing in freedom will create infinite possibilities.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Possibilities
The secrets of this earth are not for all men to see, but only for those who will seek them.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Courage, Individuality, Earth
Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Money
We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.
—Ayn Rand
Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man’s nature.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Art, Arts, Artists
The basic principle of altruism is that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value. Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will or respect for the rights of others. These are not primaries, but consequences, which, in fact, altruism makes impossible. The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is self-sacrifice – which means: self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial, self-destruction – which means: the self as a standard of evil, the selfless as a standard of the good.
—Ayn Rand
Guilt is a rope that wears thin.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Guilt, One liners
The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man’s power to conceive – a definition that invalidates man’s consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence. The good, say the mystics of muscle, is Society – a thing which they define as an organism that possesses no physical form, a super-being embodied in no one in particular and everyone in general except yourself…. The purpose of man’s life, say both, is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Man, Mankind
You were not born to be a second-hander. Howard Roark to Gail Wynand in “The Fountainhead”
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Action
To deal with men by force is as impractical as to deal with nature by persuasion.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Men
Whoever claims the right to redistribute the wealth produced by others is claiming the right to treat human beings as chattel
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Welfare
This is the difference between my morality and hedonism. The standard is not: that is good which gives me pleasure, just because it gives me pleasure (which is the standard of the dipsomaniac or the sex-chaser)
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Morals
The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Evil
Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Living, Charity, Giving
Kill reverence and you’ve killed the hero in man.
—Ayn Rand
Disciplining yourself to do what you know is right and important, although difficult, is the highroad to pride, self-esteem, and personal satisfaction.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Vision, Prophecy
It only stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there’s service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Service
What is a demanding pleasure that demands the use of ones mind! Not in the sense of problem solving, but in the sense of exercising discrimination, judgment, awareness.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: The Mind, Awareness, Mind
Love is an expression and assertion of self-esteem, a response to one’s own values in the person of another. One gains a profoundly personal, selfish joy from the mere existence of the person one loves. It is one’s own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns, and derives from love.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Love
An emotion is an automatic response, an automatic effect of man’s value premises. An effect, not a cause. There is no necessary clash, no dichotomy between man’s reason and his emotions
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Emotions
There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Coward, Cowardice
What do you know and how do you know it
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Philosophy
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
When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Reality
I made my fortune by being able to spot a certain kind of man.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Fortune
The American businessmen, as a class, have demonstrated the greatest productive genius and the most spectacular achievements ever recorded in the economic history of mankind. What reward did they receive from our culture and its intellectuals? The position of a hated, persecuted minority. The position of a scapegoat for the evils of the bureaucrats.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Business
That which you call your soul or spirit is your conciousness, and that which you call ‘free will’ is your mind’s freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Choice
The worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Guilt
No one’s happiness but my own is in my power to achieve or to destroy.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Happiness
All work is an act of philosophy.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Philosophy
So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of all money?
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Money
People create their own questions because they are afraid to look straight. All you have to do is look straight and see the road, and when you see it, don’t sit looking at it- walk.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Questions
Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.
—Ayn Rand
It does not matter that only a few in each generation will grasp and achieve the full reality of man’s proper stature—and the rest will betray it. It is those few that move the world and give life its meaning—and it is those few that I have always sought to address. The rest are no concern of mine; it is not me or “The Fountainhead” that they will betray: it is their own souls.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Individuality, Courage, Achieve, Growth, Life
Roark: “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.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Think
Just as man can’t exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one’s rights into reality, to think, to work and keep the results, which means: the right of property.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Property
[Roark to Keating:] If you want my advice, Peter,” he said at last, “you’ve made a mistake already. By asking me. By asking anyone. Never ask people. Not about your work. Don’t you know what you want? How can you stand it, not to know?”
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Mistake, Work, Vice, People
The basic need of the creator is independence. The reasoning mind cannot work under any form of compulsion. It cannot be curbed, sacrificed or subordinated to any consideration whatsoever. It demands total independence in function and in motive.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Independence
Man’s consciousness is his least known and most abused vital organ. Most people believe that consciousness as such is some sort of indeterminate faculty which has no nature, no specific identity and therefore no requirements, no needs, no rules for being properly or improperly used…. Men abuse, subvert and starve their consciousness in a manner they would not dream of applying to their hair, toenails or stomachs. They know that these things have a specific identity and specific requirements, and, if one whishes to preserve them, one must comb one’s hair, trim one’s toenails and refrain from swallowing rat poison.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: The Mind
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