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
The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see.
Do not ever say that the desire to 'do good' by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.
If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.
Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting for us in our graves - or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.
I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values.
Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it.
The creator's concern is the conquest of nature. The parasite's concern is the conquest of men.
Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.
Faith and force ... are corollaries: every period of history dominated by mysticism, was a period of statism, of dictatorship, of tyranny.
A rational mind does not work under compulsion; it does not subordinate its grasp of reality to anyone’s orders, directives, or controls; it does not sacrifice its knowledge, its view of the truth, to anyone’s opinions, threats, wishes, plans, or 'welfare.' Such a mind may be hampered by others, it may be silenced, proscribed, imprisoned, or destroyed; it cannot be forced; a gun is not an argument.
If it were true that men could achieve their good by means of turning some men into sacrificial animals, and . . . if I were asked to serve the interests of society apart from, above and against my own I would refuse. . . . I would fight in the full confidence of the justice of my battle and of a living being's right to exist.
The concept of free competition enforced by law is a grotesque contradiction in terms.
The degree of a country's freedom is the degree of its prosperity.