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
I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle.
I never found beauty in longing for the impossible and never found the possible to be beyond my reach.
She knew that she could not have reached this white serenity except as the sum of all the colors, of all the violence she had known.
Have you felt it too? Have you seen how your best friends love everything about you- except the things that count? And your most important is nothing to them; nothing, not even a sound they can recognize.
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.
Just as man can't exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one's rights into reality, to think, to work and keep the results, which means: the right of property.
Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason.
Every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics - a rational ethics - as a precondition of rebirth.
Money is the barometer of a society's virtue.
A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.
Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins.
Evil requires the sanction of the victim.
The worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt.
I don't build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.