Ayn Rand Quotes

She had been proved right so eloquently, she had thought, that comments were unnecessary.

~ Ayn Rand

No man can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation , an unrewarded duty or an involuntary servitude on another man.There can be no such thing as the right to enslave .

~ Ayn Rand

Freedom (n.): To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.

~ Ayn Rand

Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. The mind is an attribute of the individual.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. To a creator, all relations with men are secondary.No man can live for another. He cannot share his spirit just as he cannot share his body. But the second-hander has used altruism as a weapon of exploitation and reversed the base of mankind's moral principles. Men have been taught every precept that destroys the creator. Men have been taught dependence as a virtue.

~ Ayn Rand

Notice how they’ll accept anything except a man who stands alone. They recognize him at once...There’s a special, insidious kind of hatred for him. They forgive criminals. They admire dictators. Crime and violence are a tie. A form of mutual dependence. They need ties. They’ve got to force their miserable little personalities on every single person they meet. The independent man kills them—because they don’t exist within him and that’s the only form of existence they know. Notice the malignant kind of resentment against any idea that propounds independence. Notice the malice toward an independent man.

~ Ayn Rand

I take the only desire one can really permit oneself. Freedom, Alvah, freedom.”“You call that freedom?”“To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.

~ Ayn Rand

No speech is ever considered, but only the speaker. It's so much easier to pass judgement on a man than on an idea.

~ Ayn Rand

Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

~ Ayn Rand

Most people feel that they rise in their own eyes, if others want them.”“I feel that others live up to me, if they want me...

~ Ayn Rand

Are you saying,” he asked slowly, “that I rose in your estimation when you found that I wanted you?”“Of course.”“That’s not the reaction of most people to being wanted.”“It isn’t.”“Most people feel that they rise in their own eyes, if others want them.”“I feel that others live up to me, if they want me....

~ Ayn Rand

And isn’t that the root of every despicable action? Not selfishness, but precisely the absence of a self. Look at them. The man who cheats and lies, but preserves a respectable front. He knows himself to be dishonest, but others think he’s honest and he derives his self-respect from that, second-hand. The man who takes credit for an achievement which is not his own. He knows himself to be mediocre, but he’s great in the eyes of others. The frustrated wretch who professes love for the inferior and clings to those less endowed, in order to establish his own superiority by comparison.

~ Ayn Rand

Everyone has the right to make his own decisions, but none has the right to force his decision on others.

~ Ayn Rand

Everything that isn't permitted by The Law is forbidden.

~ Ayn Rand

I’ll listen if you want me to... But I think I should tell you now that nothing you can say will make any difference. If you don’t mind that, I don’t mind listening.

~ Ayn Rand

She lay on her back, looking up at the sky, feeling no desire to move or think or know that there was any time beyond this moment.

~ Ayn Rand

It was the only lie she ever told. She did not do it to protect Francisco; she did it because she felt, for some reason which she could not define, that the incident was a secret too precious to share.

~ Ayn Rand

May knowledge come to us! What is this secret our heart has understood and yet will not reveal to us, although it seems to beat as if it were endeavoring to tell it?

~ Ayn Rand

She wanted to tell him of the years she had spent looking for men such as he to work with; she wanted to tell him that his enemies were hers, that she was fighting the same battle...

~ Ayn Rand

You never wanted me to be real. You never wanted anyone to be. But you didn’t want me to show it. You wanted an act to help your act...

~ Ayn Rand

I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. Particularly when one can't see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window - no, I don't feel how small I am - but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.

~ Ayn Rand

He stepped to the window and pointed to the skyscrapers of the city. He said that we had to extinguish the lights of the world, and when we would see the lights of New York go out, we would know that our job was done.

~ Ayn Rand

Charity must be voluntary.

~ Ayn Rand

It’s easier to donate a few thousands to charity and think oneself noble than to base self-respect on personal standards of personal achievement. It’s simple to seek substitutes for competence—such easy substitutes: love, charm, kindness, charity. But there is no substitute for competence.

~ Ayn Rand

...dangers, to Francisco, were merely opportunities for another brilliant performance; there were no battles he could lose, no enemies to beat him.

~ Ayn Rand

If it is now the belief of my fellow men, who call themselves the public, that their good requires victims, then I say: 'The public good be damned, I will have no part of it!

~ Ayn Rand

...the best is a matter of standards—and I set my own standards.

~ Ayn Rand

It’s a law of survival, isn’t it?—to seek the best. I didn’t come for your sake. I came for mine.

~ Ayn Rand

Nothing can justify injustice.

~ Ayn Rand

Don’t tell me your evaluation. Give me the facts.

~ Ayn Rand

We knew not where we were going. We only knew that we must run, run to the end of the world, run to the end of our days.

~ Ayn Rand

He knew that the dread in these men’s minds was not of the fact, but of his naming it—as if the fact had not existed, but his words held the power to make it exist.

~ Ayn Rand

We fell, but we never let the box fall from our hands. Then we ran. We ran blindly, and men and houses streaked past us in a torrent without shape.

~ Ayn Rand

Well, whose opinion did you take?”“I don’t ask for opinions.”“What do you go by?”“Judgment.”“Well, whose judgment did you take?”“Mine.”“But whom did you consult about it?”“Nobody.

~ Ayn Rand

...Opinion without a rational process.

~ Ayn Rand

If you write a line of zeroes, it´s still nothing.

~ Ayn Rand

The skyline of New York is a monument of a splendour that no pyramids or palaces will ever equal or approach.

~ Ayn Rand

Altruism declares that any action taken for the benefit of others is good and any action taken for one's own benefit is evil. Thus the beneficiary of an action is the only criterion of moral value - and so long as that beneficiary is anybody other than oneself anything goes.

~ Ayn Rand

The entire history of science is a progression of exploded fallacies.

~ Ayn Rand

Kill reverence and you've killed the hero in man.

~ Ayn Rand

What you think is an illusion created by your glands your emotions and in the last analysis by the content of your stomach. That gray matter you're so proud of is like a mirror in an amusement park which transmits to you nothing but distorted signals from reality forever beyond your grasp.

~ Ayn Rand