Rand Quotes

Ayn Rand - “He had a big head and a face so ugly it became almost fascinating.”

Ayn Rand - “So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate the use of physical force against others.... When a man attempts to deal with me by force, I answer him by force. It is only as retaliation that force may be used and only against the man who starts its use. No, I do not share his evil or sink to his concept of morality: I merely grant him his choice, destruction, the only destruction he had the right to choose: his own.”

Ayn Rand - “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.”

Ayn Rand - “The worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt.”

Ayn Rand - “Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.”

Ayn Rand - “I don't know. But I've watched them here for twenty years and I've seen the change. They used to rush through here, and it was wonderful to watch, it was the hurry of men who knew where they were going and were eager to get there. Now they're hurrying because they are afraid. It's not a purpose that drives them, it's fear. They're not going anywhere, they're escaping. And I don't think they know what it is that they want to escape. They don't look at one another. They jerk when brushed against. They smile too much, but it's an ugly kind of smiling: it's not joy, it's pleading. I don't know what it is that's happening to the world.”

Ayn Rand - “An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.”

Ayn Rand - “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.”

Ayn Rand - “Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equalled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism.”

10.

Ayn Rand - “The men who are not interested in philosophy need it most urgently; they are most helplessly in its power.”

11.

Ayn Rand - “Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future.”

12.

Ayn Rand - “Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice. If he abdicates his power, he abdicates the status of man, and the grinding chaos of the irrational is what he achieves as his sphere of existence — by his own choice.”

13.

Ayn Rand - “America's abundance was not created by public sacrifices to 'the common good,' but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes.”

14.

Ayn Rand - “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.”

15.

Ayn Rand - “Kill reverence and you've killed the hero in man.”

16.

Ayn Rand - “Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.”

17.

Ayn Rand - “Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think.”

18.

Ayn Rand - “Don't consider our interests or desires. You have no duty to anyone but yourself.”

19.

Ayn Rand - “The lust that drives others to enslave an empire, had become, in her limits, a passion for power over him. She had set out to break him, as if, unable to equal his value, she could surpass it by destroying it, as if the measure of his greatness would thus become the measure of hers, as if the vandal who smashed a statue were greater than the artist who had made it, as if the murderer who killed a child were greater than the mother who had given it birth.”

20.

Ayn Rand - “You'll come back, because yours is an error of knowledge, not a moral failure, not an act of surrender to evil, but only the last act of being victim to your own virtue. We'll wait for you and when you come back, you will have discovered that there need never be any conflict among your desires, nor so tragic a clash of values as the one you've borne so well.”

21.

Ayn Rand - “Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever.”

22.

Ayn Rand - “Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision.”

23.

Ayn Rand - “Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth — the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one, would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?”

24.

Ayn Rand - “Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins.”

25.

Ayn Rand - “A government is the most dangerous threat to man’s rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.”

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