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
Freedom comes from seeing the ignorance of your critics and discovering the emptiness of their virtue.
You don't love causes. You don't love everybody indiscriminately. You love only those who deserve it.
Selfishness does not mean only to do things for one's self. One may do things, affecting others, for his own pleasure and benefit. This is not immoral, but the highest of morality.
Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others.
Romantic art is the fuel and the spark plug of a Man's soul. It's task is to set a soul on fire and never let it go out.
A gun is not an argument.
The goal of the 'liberals' - as it emerges from the record of the past decades - was to smuggle this country into welfare statism by means of single, concrete, specific measures, enlarging the power of the government a step at a time, never permitting these steps to be summed up into principles, never permitting their direction to be identified or the basic issue to be named. Thus, statism was to come, not by vote or by violence, but by slow rot - by a long process of evasion and epistemological corruption, leading to a fait accompli.
Don't ever get angry at a man for stating the truth.
The greatest threat to mankind and civilization is the spread of the totalitarian philosophy. Its best ally is not the devotion of its followers but the confusion of its enemies. To fight it, we must understand it.
I am a man who does not exist for others.
If parasitism, favoritism, corruption, and greed for the unearned did not exist, a mixed economy would bring them into existence.
A majority vote is not an epistemological validation of an idea. Voting is merely a proper political device--within a strictly, constitutionall y delimited sphere of action--for choosing the practical means of implementing a society’s basic principles. But those principles are not determined by vote.
All work is an act of philosophy.
The mark of an honest man... is that he means what he says and knows what he means.