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
You have no choice about your capacity to feel that something is good for you or evil, but what you will consider good or evil, what will give you joy or pain, what you will love or hate, desire or fear, depends on your standard of value.
Or did you say it's the love of money that's the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know its nature. To love money is to known and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money - and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.
One can't love man without hating most of the creatures who pretend to bear his name.
Ask anything of men. Ask them to achieve wealth, fame, love, brutality, murder, self-sacrifice. But don’t ask them to achieve self-respect. They will hate your soul.
The secrets of this earth are not for all men to see, but only for those who will seek them.
Reality confronts man with a great many "musts," but all of them are conditional; the formula of realistic necessity is: "You must, if " and the "if" stands for man's choice
Thanksgiving is a typically American holiday... The lavish meal is a symbol of the fact that abundant consumption is the result and reward of production.
That which you see is the first thing to disbelieve
Mister, there's nothing I've got to do except die
Mediocrity" doesn't mean average intelligence, it means an average intelligence that resents and envies its betters
...When you have established that one alternative is good and the other is evil, there is no justification for the choice of a mixture. There is no justification ever for choosing any part of what you know to be evil.
There can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions to an individual, but permitted to a mob.
There can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob
Every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics - a rational ethics - as a precondition of rebirth.