Ayn Rand quotes

The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see.

Ayn Rand

The truth is not for all men, but only for those who seek it.

Ayn Rand

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

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, the function of his reasoning mind.

Ayn Rand

To say 'I love you' one must first be able to say the 'I'.

Ayn Rand

Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.

Ayn Rand

A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.

Ayn Rand

The question isn't who is going to let me, it's who is going to stop me.

Ayn Rand

To achieve, you need thought. You have to know what you are doing and that's real power.

Ayn Rand

The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.

Ayn Rand

Guilt is a rope that wears thin.

Ayn Rand

Doctors are not servants of their patients, they are traders like everyone else in a free society and they should bear that title proudly considering the crucial importance of the services they offer.

Ayn Rand

Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplacable spark. In the hopeless swamps of the not quite, the not yet, and the not at all, do not let the hero in your soul perish and leave only frustration for the life you deserved, but never have been able to reach. The world you desire can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.

Ayn Rand

Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.

Ayn Rand

Civilization is the progress toward a society of 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

Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement.

Ayn Rand

A government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally d.

Ayn Rand

A good novel is an indivisible sum. Every scene, sequence and passage of a good novel has to involve, contribute to and advance all three of its major attributes: theme, plot, characterization.

Ayn Rand

A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire.

Ayn Rand

Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing buy rational actions.

Ayn Rand

He was guilty of nothing, except that he earned his own fortune and never forgot that it was his.

Ayn Rand

Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by fraud.

Ayn Rand

I can accept anything, except what seems to be the easiest for most people: the half-way, the almost, the just-about, the in-between.

Ayn Rand

I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.

Ayn Rand

If there is any one proof of a man's incompetence, it is the stagnant mentality of a worker who, doing some small routine job in a vast undertaking, does not care to look beyond the lever of a machine, does not choose to know how the machine got there or what makes his job possible, and proclaims that the management of the undertaking is parasitically and unnecessary.

Ayn Rand

Live a life as a monument to your soul.

Ayn Rand

Love is our response to our highest values. Love is self-enjoyment. The noblest love is born out of admiration of another.

Ayn Rand

Men have been taught that it is a virtue to agree with others. But the creator is the man who disagrees. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to swim with the current. But the creator is the man who goes against the current. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to stand together. But the creator is the man who stands alone.

Ayn Rand

Money is the barometer of a society's virtue.

Ayn Rand

Thanksgiving is a typically American holiday. The lavish meal is a symbol of the fact that abundant consumption is the result and reward of production.

Ayn Rand

The Argument from Intimidation is a confession of intellectual impotence.

Ayn Rand

The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it.

Ayn Rand

Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of other men. Blood, whips and guns, or dollars. Take your choice, there is no other.

Ayn Rand

Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think.

Ayn Rand

Mediocrity doesn't mean average intelligence, it means an average intelligence that resents and envies its betters.

Ayn Rand