Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand
Ayn Randwas a Russian-born American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter. She is known for her two best-selling novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and for developing a philosophical system she called Objectivism. Educated in Russia, she moved to the United States in 1926. She had a play produced on Broadway in 1935–1936. After two early novels that were initially unsuccessful in America, she achieved fame with her 1943 novel, The Fountainhead...
NationalityRussian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth2 February 1905
CitySaint Petersburg, Russia
CountryRussian Federation
She thought: at this moment, the glass stem between his fingers feels just like the one between mine. We have this much in common.
The leaves streamed down, trembling in the sun. They were not green, only a few, scattered through the torrent, stood out in single drops of green so bright and pure that it hurt the eyes; the rest were not a color, but a light, the substance of fire on metal, living sparks without edges. And it looked as if the forest were a spread of light boiling slowly to produce this color, the green rising in small bubbles, the condensed essence of spring. The trees met, blending over the road and the spots of sun on the ground moved with the shifting of the branches, like a conscious caress.
She thought how strange it would be if she ever said 'Hello' to him. One did not greet oneself each morning.
Rights are not a matter of numbers - and there can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob.
Man's unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself.
When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is learning to understand and control the behavior of crop plants and domestic animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized.
Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.
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.
God... a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive.
There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.
Man holds these rights [life, liberty and property], not from the Collective nor for the Collective, but against the Collective - as a barrier which the Collective cannot cross... these rights are man's protection against all other men.
Altruism does not mean mere kindness or generosity, but the sacrifice of the best among men to the worst, the sacrifice of virtues to flaws, of ability to incompetence, of progress to stagnation-and the subordinating of all life and of all values to the claims of anyone's suffering.
When it is established that government by right can take wealth from some and give it to others. When a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law, men will use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they have passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket.
I am not morally obligated to care more for a man than he cares for himself.