The Argument from Intimidation is a confession of intellectual impotence.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Arguments
Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Wealth
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
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
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
To say ‘I love you’ one must know first how to say the ‘I’.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Love
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
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
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
To achieve you need thought. You have to know what you are doing and that’s real power.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Achieving, Power
A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.
—Ayn Rand
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
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
The question isn’t “who is going to let me”; it’s “who is going to stop me”.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Goals, Dedication, Determination
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
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
The secrets of this earth are not for all men to see, but only for those who will seek them.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Earth, Individuality, Courage
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 worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Guilt
All work is an act of philosophy.
—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
Upper classes are a nation’s past; the middle class is its future.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Future, Class, The Future
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
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
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
Topics: Fortune
I don’t build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Customers
You were not born to be a second-hander. Howard Roark to Gail Wynand in “The Fountainhead”
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Action
A culture is made—or destroyed—by its articulate voices.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Culture
Unjust laws have to be fought ideologically; they cannot be fought or corrected by means of mere disobedience and futile martyrdom.
—Ayn Rand
The ladder of success is best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Success, Opportunity
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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