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
What do you know and how do you know it
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Philosophy
Why do they always teach us that it’s easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It’s the hardest thing in the world—to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Rest, Courage, Evil, Great, Kind, Teach
Integrity is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your consciousness, just as honesty is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake existence.
—Ayn Rand
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
The purpose of the law is not to prevent a future offense, but to punish the one actually committed.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Law
The question isn’t “who is going to let me”; it’s “who is going to stop me”.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Determination, Goals, Dedication
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
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
Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Capitalism
The common good of a collective—a race, a class, a state—was the claim and justification of every tyranny ever established over men. Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equaled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism? Does the fault lie in men’s hypocrisy or in the nature of the principle? The most dreadful butchers were the most sincere. The believed in the perfect society reached through the guillotine and the firing squad. Nobody questioned their right to murder since they were murdering for an altruistic purpose. It was accepted that man must be sacrificed for other men. Actors change, but the course of the tragedy remains the same. A humanitarian who starts with the declarations of love for mankind and ends with a sea of blood. It goes on and will go on so long as men believe that an action is good if it is unselfish. That permits the altruist to act and forces his victims to bear it. The leaders of collectivist movements ask nothing of themselves. But observe the results.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Country, Tyranny
You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.
—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: Growth, Individuality, Achieve, Life, Courage
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
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
Anything may be betrayed, anyone may be forgiven, but not those who lack the courage of their own greatness.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Growth, Courage, Betrayal
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
Do not consider Collectivists as sincere but deluded idealists. The proposal to enslave some men for the sake of others is not an ideal; brutality is not idealistic, no matter what its purpose. Do not ever say that the desire to do good by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Idealism
The idea that ‘the public interest’ supersedes private interests and rights can have but one meaning: that the interests and rights of some individuals take precedence over the interests and rights of others.
—Ayn Rand
The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Government, Power
You must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the secondary consequences.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Goals
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
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
Believing in fate produces fate. Believing in freedom will create infinite possibilities.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Possibilities
A desire presupposes the possibility of action to achieve it; action presupposes a goal which is worth achieving.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Desire
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
Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.
—Ayn Rand
Capitalism is our only moral system. All other systems take advantage of man’s rights and liberties.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Capitalism
The man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.
—Ayn Rand
From the smallest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from one attribute of man
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Reason
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
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Isaac Asimov American Novelist, Critic, Popular Scientist
Vladimir Nabokov Russian-born American Novelist
Gore Vidal American Novelist
Joyce Carol Oates American Novelist
Igor Stravinsky Russian-born American Composer
Vladimir Horowitz Russian-born American Pianist
Leo Rosten American Humorist
Bernard Berenson American Art Critic
Anita Loos American Actor
Philip Roth American Novelist, Short-story Writer