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 want to be prepared to claim the greatest virtue of all - that I was a man who made money
Let us destroy, but don't let us pretend that we are commiting an act of virtue.
You love people, not for what you do for them or what they do for you. You love them for their values; their virtues.
To know one's own desires, their meaning and their costs requires the highest human virtue: rationality.
Value is that which one acts to gain and/or keep. Virtue is the act by which one aims and/or keeps it.
When you are asked to love everybody indiscriminately, that is to love people without any standard, to love them regardless of whether they have any value or virtue, you are asked to love nobody.
Freedom comes from seeing the ignorance of your critics and discovering the emptiness of their virtue.
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.