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Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes.
AYN RAND, The Virtue of Selfishness
The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me.
AYN RAND, attributed, Surviving Socialist America (Morse, 2010)
Anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today.
AYN RAND, The Romantic Manifesto
If you don't know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn.
There are only two means by which men can deal with one another: guns or logic. Force or persuasion. Those who know that they cannot win by means of logic, have always resorted to guns.
AYN RAND, Philosophy: Who Needs It
Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all.
Even if smog were a risk to human life, we must remember that life in nature, without technology, is wholesale death.
AYN RAND, The Objectivist, Feb. 1971
Remember also that the smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
AYN RAND, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it's yours.
The mind is the attribute of man. When man is born, he comes into existence with only one weapon with him--The reasoning mind.
AYN RAND, The Fountainhead
It is not advisable ... to venture unsolicited opinions. You should spare yourself the embarrassing discovery of their exact value to your listener.
I can accept anything, except what seems to be the easiest for most people: the half-way, the almost, the just-about, the in-between.
AYN RAND, The Fountainhead
Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.
What is greatness? I will answer: it is the capacity to live by the three fundamental values of John Galt: reason, purpose, self-esteem.
AYN RAND, Playboy interview, Mar. 1964
An artist reveals his naked soul in his work - and so, gentle reader, do you when you respond to it.
AYN RAND, The Romantic Manifesto
Morality ends where the gun begins.
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.
AYN RAND, The Ayn Rand Letter
This miracle of me is mine to own and keep, and mine to guard, and mine to use, and mine to kneel before.
Devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality; there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.
Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer—and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.
AYN RAND, The Virtue of Selfishness
In a capitalist society, all human relationships are voluntary. Men are free to cooperate or not, to deal with one another or not, as their own individual judgments, convictions and interests dictate.
AYN RAND, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
A leash is only a rope with a noose on both ends.
AYN RAND, The Fountainhead
Look around you: what you have done to society, you have done it first within your soul; one is the image of the other. This dismal wreckage, which is now your world, is the physical form of the treason you committed to your values, to your friends, to your defenders, to your future, to your country, to yourself.
Observe, in politics, that the term extremism has become a synonym of "evil," regardless of the content of the issue (the evil is not what you are extreme about, but that you are "extreme"—i.e., consistent).
AYN RAND, The Virtue of Selfishness
Man cannot survive except by gaining knowledge, and reason is his only means to gain it.
One can't love man without hating most of the creatures who pretend to bear his name.
AYN RAND, The Fountainhead
Pity for the guilty is treason to the innocent.
AYN RAND, The Romantic Manifesto
The conservatives see man as a body freely roaming the earth, building sand piles or factories—with an electronic computer inside his skull, controlled from Washington. The liberals see man as a soul freewheeling to the farthest reaches of the universe—but wearing chains from nose to toes when he crosses the street to buy a loaf of bread.
AYN RAND, Philosophy: Who Needs It
Love is our response to our highest values.
A desire presupposes the possibility of action to achieve it; action presupposes a goal which is worth achieving.
For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbors - between those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it.
All work is an act of philosophy.
Every loneliness is a pinnacle.
AYN RAND, The Fountainhead
A house can have integrity, just like a person ... and just as seldom.
AYN RAND, The Fountainhead
If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.
AYN RAND, Philosophy: Who Needs It
Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed.
AYN RAND, The Fountainhead
Selfishness does not mean only to do things for one's self. One may do things, affecting others, for his own pleasure and benefit. This is not immoral, but the highest of morality.
AYN RAND, Journals of Ayn Rand
At first, man was enslaved by the gods. But he broke their chains. Then he was enslaved by the kings. But he broke their chains. He was enslaved by his birth, by his kin, by his race. But he broke their chains. He declared to all his brothers that a man has rights which neither god nor king nor other men can take away from him, no matter what their number, for his is the right of man, and there is no right on earth above this right. And he stood on the threshold of freedom for which the blood of the centuries behind him had been spilled.
AYN RAND, Anthem
To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That's what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul -- would you understand why that's much harder?
AYN RAND, The Fountainhead
Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man's genetic lineage--the notion that a man's intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.
AYN RAND, The Virtue of Selfishness
Rationalization is a process of not perceiving reality, but of attempting to make reality fit one's emotions.
AYN RAND, Philosophy: Who Needs It?
Men who reject the responsibility of thought and reason can only exist as parasites on the thinking of others.
AYN RAND, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism
"This is pity," he thought, and then he lifted his head in wonder. He thought that there must be something terribly wrong with a world in which this monstrous feeling is called a virtue.
AYN RAND, The Fountainhead
Do you know the hallmark of a second rater? It's resentment of another man's achievement. Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own--they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top.
AYN RAND, Atlas Shrugged
Don't set out to raze all shrines--you'll frighten men. Enshrine mediocrity--and the shrines are razed.
AYN RAND, The Fountainhead
Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea.
AYN RAND, The Fountainhead
Every great new invention was denounced. The first motor was considered foolish. The airplane was considered impossible. The power loom was considered vicious. Anesthesia was considered sinful. But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered and they paid. But they won.
AYN RAND, The Fountainhead
The issue is whether man is to be regarded as a sacrificial animal. Any man of self-esteem will answer: "No." Altruism says: "Yes."
AYN RAND, Philosophy: Who Needs It
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