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
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
You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.
—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
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
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: Tyranny, Country
The desire not to be anything is the desire not to be.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Life, Desire
He had always wanted to write Music and he could give no other identity to the thing he sought. If you want to know what it is, he told himself, listen to the first phrases of Tchaikowsky’s First Concerto, or the last movement of Rachmaninoff’s Second. Men have not found the words for it nor the deed nor the thought, but they have found the Music. Let me see that in one single act of man on earth. Let me see it made real. Let me see the answer to the promise of that Music. Not servants nor those served; not altars and immolations; but the final, the fulfilled, innocent of pain. Don’t help me or serve me, but let me see it once, because I need it. Don’t work for my happiness, my brothers – Show me yours – show me that it is possible – show me your achievement – and the knowledge will give me courage for mine.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Knowledge, Happiness, Music, Vision, Purpose, Achieve
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
I’m working to improve my methods, and every hour I save is an hour added to my life.
—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: Living, Charity, Giving
I made my fortune by being able to spot a certain kind of man.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Fortune
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
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
Civilization is the progress of a society towards privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Self-Discovery
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
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
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
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
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 were not born to be a second-hander. Howard Roark to Gail Wynand in “The Fountainhead”
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Action
Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Wealth
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
The Argument from Intimidation is a confession of intellectual impotence.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Arguments
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
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
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
Reality confronts man with a great many “musts,” but all of them are conditional; the formula of realistic necessity is: “You must, if” and the “if” stands for man’s choice
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Reality
There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Coward, Cowardice
About Mike the construction worker, friend of Roark: “He worshipped expertness of any kind. He loved his work passionately and had no tolerance for anything save for other single-track devotions. He was a master in his own filed and felt no sympathy except for mastery. His view of the world was simple: there were the able and there were the incompetent; he was not concerned with the latter.
—Ayn Rand
Topics: Passion, Friend, Work, Sin, Master, Mastery, Love, Kind
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