48 Quotes by Ayn Rand
- The ladder of success is best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity.
- The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.
- The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.
- The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap.
- The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me.
- The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see.
- So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of all money?
- The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
- Potentially, 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.
- To say "I love you" one must first be able to say the "I."
- People create their own questions because they are afraid to look straight. All you have to do is look straight and see the road, and when you see it, don't sit looking at it - walk.
- Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone.
- The truth is not for all men, but only for those who seek it.
- The worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt.
- There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.
- There can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions to an individual, but permitted to a mob.
- There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.
- To achieve, you need thought. You have to know what you are doing and that's real power.
- Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future.
- We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.
- Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think.
- When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is learning to understand and control the behavior of crop plants and domestic animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized.
- 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.
- A desire presupposes the possibility of action to achieve it; action presupposes a goal which is worth achieving.
- Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision.
- Government "help" to business is just as disastrous as government persecution... the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off.
- Money is the barometer of a society's virtue.
- 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.
- 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.
- Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.
- Do not ever say that the desire to "do good" by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.
- Every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics - a rational ethics - as a precondition of rebirth.
- Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice.
- Evil requires the sanction of the victim.
- Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins.
- God... a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive.
- I don't build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.
- If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.
- Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.
- It only stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.
- Just as man can't exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one's rights into reality, to think, to work and keep the results, which means: the right of property.
- Man's unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself.
- Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason.
- Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.
- From the smallest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from one attribute of man - the function of his reasoning mind.
- A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.
- A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.
- A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not the desire to beat others.
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