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
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
Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.
—Ayn Rand
To achieve you need thought. You have to know what you are doing and that’s real power.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Power, Achieving
To deal with men by force is as impractical as to deal with nature by persuasion.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Men
Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men’s stupidity, but your talent to their reason.
—Ayn Rand
Every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics—a rational ethics—as a precondition of rebirth.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Ethics
Every man is free to rise as far as he’s able or willing but the degree to which he thinks determines the degree to which he’ll rise.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Positive Attitudes, Optimism
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
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
You know what you are actually in love with? Integrity. The impossible. The clean, consistent, reasonable, self-faithful, the all-of-one-style, like a work of art.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Integrity, Love
The man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.
—Ayn Rand
All public interest legislation (and any distribution of money taken by force from some men for the unearned benefit of others) comes down ultimately to the grant of an undefined undefinable, non-objective, arbitrary power to some government officials. The worst aspect of it is not that such a power can be used dishonestly, but that it cannot be used honestly. The wisest man in the world, with the purest integrity, cannot find a criterion for the just, equitable, rational application of an unjust, inequitable, irrational principle.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Law
The desire not to be anything is the desire not to be.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Life, Desire
Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Money
The secrets of this earth are not for all men to see, but only for those who will seek them.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Courage, Earth, Individuality
Capitalism is our only moral system. All other systems take advantage of man’s rights and liberties.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Capitalism
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
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
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
The question isn’t “who is going to let me”; it’s “who is going to stop me”.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Determination, Goals, Dedication
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
I made my fortune by being able to spot a certain kind of man.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Fortune
A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Integrity
To say ‘I love you’ one must know first how to say the ‘I’.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Love
Upper classes are a nation’s past; the middle class is its future.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Class, Future, The Future
The ladder of success is best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Opportunity, Success
A desire presupposes the possibility of action to achieve it; action presupposes a goal which is worth achieving.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Desire
If you agree with some tenets of Objectivism, but disagree with others, do not call yourself an Objectivist; give proper authorship credit for the parts you agree with.
—Ayn Rand
She knew she could not have reached this white serenity except as the sum of all the colors, of all the violence she had known.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: New
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
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