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
Every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics - a rational ethics - as a precondition of rebirth.
A morality that holds need as a claim, holds emptiness-non-existence-as its standard of value; it rewards an absence, a defect: weakness, inability, incompetence, suffering, disease, disaster, the lack, the fault, the flaw-the zero.
If one's actions are honest, one does not need the predated confidence of others.
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.
To achieve, you need thought
The men who are not interested in philosophy need it most urgently; they are most helplessly in its power.
I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.
Every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics - a rational ethics - as a precondition of rebirth.
To achieve, you need thought. You have to know what you are doing and that's real power.
When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion...th at in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing-you may know that your society is doomed.
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