Famous Quotes & Sayings

Ayn Rand

I made my fortune by being able to spot a certain kind of man.

Ayn Rand

One must differentiate between one's thoughts and one's emotions with full clarity and precision...No discussion, cooperation, agreement, or understanding is possible among men who substitute emotion for proof.

Ayn Rand

But the mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought. An agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise or an average drawn upon many individual thoughts.

Ayn Rand

Censorship' is a term pertaining only to governmental action. No private action is censorship. No private individual or agency can silence a man or suppress a publication; only the government can do so. The freedom of speech of private individuals includes the right not to agree, not to listen and not to finance one's own antagonists.

Ayn Rand

In the temple of his spirit, each man is alone.

Ayn Rand

Any alleged 'right' of one man, which necessitates the violation of the rights of another, is not and cannot be a right.

Ayn Rand

A rational man is guided by his thinking - by a process of Reason - not by his feelings and desires.

Ayn Rand

Morality pertains only to the sphere of man's free will - only to those actions which are open to his choice.

Ayn Rand

The man who attempts to live for others is a dependent. He is a parasite in motive and makes parasites of those he serves.

Ayn Rand

Men have been taught that their first concern is to relieve the suffering of others. ... To make that the highest test of virtue is to make suffering the most important part of life. Then man must wish to see others suffer in order that he may be virtuous. Such is the nature of altruism.

Ayn Rand

The mind is the attribute of man. When man is born, he comes into existence with only one weapon with him--The reasoning mind.

Ayn Rand

Capitalism is our only moral system. All other systems take advantage of man's rights and liberties.

Ayn Rand

Contrary to the vulgar belief that men are motivated primarily by materialistic considerations, we now see the capitalist system being discredited and destroyed all over the world, even though this system has given men the greatest material comforts.

Ayn Rand

A chronic lack of pleasure, of any enjoyable, rewarding or stimulating experiences, produces a slow, gradual, day-by-day erosion of man's emotional vitality, which he may ignore or repress, but which is recorded by the relentless computer of his subconscious mechanism that registers an ebbing flow, then a trickle, then a few last drops of fuel--until the day when his inner motor stops and he wonders desperately why he has no desire to go on, unable to find any definable cause of his hopeless, chronic sense of exhaustion.

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

Capitalism has been called nationalistic - yet it is the only system that banished ethnicity, and made it possible, in the United States, for men of various, formerly antagonistic nationalities to live together in peace.

Ayn Rand

Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value.

Ayn Rand

We the Living is not a novel 'about Soviet Russia.' It is a novel about Man against the State. Its basic theme is the sanctity of human life - using the word 'sanctity' not in a mystical sense, but in the sense of 'supreme value.'

Ayn Rand

A man's rights are not violated by a private individual's refusal to deal with him.

Ayn Rand

A rational man knows-or makes it a point to discover-the source of his emotions, the basic premises from which they come.

Ayn Rand

Just as there is no such thing as a collective or racial mind, so there is no such thing as a collective or racial achievement. There are only individual minds and individual achievements-an d a culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiate d masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.

Ayn Rand

To the extent to which a man is rational, life is the premise directing his actions. To the extent to which he is irrational, the premise directing his actions is death.

Ayn Rand

Great men can't be ruled.

Ayn Rand

The men of the press, who despised their own profession, did not know why they were enjoying it today. One of them, a young man with years of notorious success behind him and a cynical look of twice his age, said suddenly, 'I know what I'd like to be: I wish I could be a man who covers news!'

Ayn Rand

The government was set to protect man from criminals-and the constitution was written to protect man from the government. The Bill of Rights was not directed at private citizens, but against the government-as an explicit declaration that individual rights supersede any public or social power.

Ayn Rand

Any material element or resource which, in order to become of use or value to men, requires the application of human knowledge and effort, should be private property-by the right of those who apply the knowledge and effort.

Ayn Rand

In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that man’s proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads.

Ayn Rand

The purpose of man's life...is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question.

Ayn Rand

A government is the most dangerous threat to man

Ayn Rand

The fact that a man has no claim on others ... does not preclude or prohibit good will among men and does not make it immoral to offer or to accept voluntary, non-sacrificial assistance.

Ayn Rand

Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy . . . 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 but rational actions.

Ayn Rand

If a dedication page were to precede the total of my work, it would read: To the glory of Man.

Ayn Rand

Kant is the most evil man in mankind's history.