| ""Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men's vices or men's stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment's or a penny's worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you'll scream that money is evil. Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the root of your hatred of money?" Ayn Rand Popular Quotes |
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| "Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned." Ayn Rand |
| "If you agree with some tenets of Objectivism, but disagree with others, do not call yourself an Objectivist; give proper authorship credit for the parts you agree with—and then indulge in any flights of fancy you wish, on your own." Ayn Rand |
| "Man's consciousness is his least known and most abused vital organ. Most people believe that consciousness as such is some sort of indeterminate faculty which has no nature, no specific identity and therefore no requirements, no needs, no rules for being properly or improperly used.... Men abuse, subvert and starve their consciousness in a manner they would not dream of applying to their hair, toenails or stomachs. They know that these things have a specific identity and specific requirements, and, if one whishes to preserve them, one must comb one's hair, trim one's toenails and refrain from swallowing rat poison." Ayn Rand Popular Quotes |
| "Money is the barometer of a society's virtue." Ayn Rand |
| "So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of all money?" Ayn Rand |
| "The worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt." Ayn Rand Quotes |
| ... reason accepts no commandments. Ayn Rand Adages |
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| ...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. Ayn Rand Adages |
| A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality Ayn Rand Sayings |
| A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others Ayn Rand Adages |
| A culture is made -- or destroyed -- by its articulate voices. Ayn Rand Adages |
| A desire presupposes the possibility of action to achieve it; action presupposes a goal which is worth achieving. 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. Ayn Rand Adages |
| A house can have integrity, just like a person Ayn Rand Quotes |
| 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 Adages |
| Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death. Ayn Rand |
| An emotion as much tells you nothing about reality, beyond the fact that something makes you feel something. Ayn Rand |
| 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. Ayn Rand |
| Ask youself 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. 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 Sayings |
| Contrary to the vulgar belief that men are motivated primarily by materialistic considerations, we now see the capitalist system being discredited and destroyed all over the world, even though this system has given men the greatest material comforts Ayn Rand |
| Do not consider Collectivists as "sincere but deluded idealists". The proposal to enslave some men for the sake of others is not an ideal; brutality is not "idealistic," no matter what its purpose. Do not ever say that the desire to "do good" by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives. Ayn Rand Quotations |
| Do not ever say that the desire to "do good" by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives. Ayn Rand |
| Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind, and a step that travels unlimited roads Ayn Rand Sayings |
| Ever since Kant divorced reason from reality, his intellectual descendants have been diligently widening the breach. Ayn Rand Quotes |
| Every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics -- a rational ethics -- as a precondition of rebirth. Ayn Rand Quotes |
| Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Ayn Rand |
| Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equaled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism? Ayn Rand Popular Quotes |
| Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice. Ayn Rand |
| Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins. Ayn Rand |
| God... a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive. Ayn Rand |
| 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. Ayn Rand |
| Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values. Ayn Rand |
| He had always wanted to write Music and he could give no other identity to the thing he sought. If you want to know what it is, he told himself, listen to the first phrases of Tchaikowsky's First Concerto, or the last movement of Rachmaninoff's Second. Men have not found the words for it nor the deed nor the thought, but they have found the Music. Let me see that in one single act of man on earth. Let me see it made real. Let me see the answer to the promise of that Music. Not servants nor those served; not altars and immolations; but the final, the fulfilled, innocent of pain. Don't help me or serve me, but let me see it once, because I need it. Don't work for my happiness, my brothers - Show me yours - show me that it is possible - show me your achievement - and the knowledge will give me courage for mine. Ayn Rand |
| He liked to observe emotions; they were like red lanterns strung along the dark unknown of another's personality, marking vulnerable points. Ayn Rand Adages |
| He thought of all the living species that train their young in the art of survival, the cats who teach their kittens to hunt, the birds who spend such strident efforts on teaching their fledglings to fly - yet man, whose tool of survival is the mind, does not merely fail to teach a child to think, but devotes the child's education to the purpose of destroying his brain, of convincing him that thought is futile and evil, before he has started to think ... Men would shudder, he thought, if they saw a mother bird plucking the feathers from the wings of her young, then pushing him out of the nest to struggle for survival - yet that was what they did to their children. Ayn Rand Quotes |
| I consider promiscuity immoral. Not because sex is evil, but because sex is too good and too important. Ayn Rand Remarks |
| I don't build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build. Ayn Rand |
| I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction. - Anthem 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 Quotes |
| If a life could have a theme song - and I believe every worthwhile one has - mine is a religion, an obsession, a mania or all of these expressed in one word - individualism. I was born with that obsession, and I've never seen and do not know now a cause more worthy, more misunderstood, more see Ayn Rand Sayings |
| If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject. Ayn Rand |
| If one doesn't respect oneself one can have neither love nor respect for others. Ayn Rand |
| In that world, you'll be able to rise in the morning with the spirit you had known in your childhood: that spirit of eagerness, adventure and certainty which comes from dealing with a rational universe Ayn Rand |
| In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. 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. Ayn Rand Adages |
| Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual). Ayn Rand |
| Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law. Ayn Rand |
| It is not advisable, James, to venture unsolicited opinions. You should spare yourself the embarrassing discovery of their exact value to your listener. Ayn Rand |
| 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. Ayn Rand Remarks |
| Judge not, that ye be not judge"... is an abdication of moral responsibility: it is a moral blank check one gives to others in exchange for a moral blank check one expects for oneself. There is no escape from the fact that men have to make choices; so long as men have to make choices, there is no escape from moral values; so long as moral values are at stake, no moral neutrality is possible. To abstain from condemning a torturer, is to become an accesory to the torture and murder of his victims. The moral principle to adopt... is: "Judge, and be prepared to be judged. Ayn Rand |
| 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. Ayn Rand |
| Learn to distinguish the difference between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality Ayn Rand |
| Love is an expression and assertion of self-esteem, a response to one's own values in the person of another. One gains a profoundly personal, selfish joy from the mere existence of the person one loves. It is one's own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns, and derives from love. Ayn Rand |
| Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another. Ayn Rand |
| Man is a being with free will; therefore, each man is potentially good or evil, and it's up to him and only him (through his reasoning mind) to decide which he wants to be. Ayn Rand |
| Mediocrity doesn't mean average intelligence, it means an average intelligence that resents and envies its betters. Ayn Rand Sayings |
| Mister, there's nothing I've got to do except die Ayn Rand |
| Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason. Ayn Rand Adages |
| Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. Ayn Rand Sayings |
| 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. Ayn Rand |
| 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 Ayn Rand Popular Quotes |
| Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone. Ayn Rand Adages |
| Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. Ayn Rand Remarks |
| So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of all money? Ayn Rand Popular Quotes |
| 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 Sayings |
| That love is reverence, and worship, and glory, and the upward glance. Not a bandage for dirty sores. But they don't know it. Those who speak of love most promiscuously are the ones who've never felt it. They make some sort of feeble stew out of sympathy, compassion, comtempt, and general indiference, and they call it love. Once you've felt what it means to love as you and I know it - the total passion for the total height - you are unable of anything else. Ayn Rand Quotations |
| That which you call your soul or spirit is your conciousness, and that which you call 'free will' is your mind's freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character. Ayn Rand |
| That which you see is the first thing to disbelieve Ayn Rand |
| The action required to sustain human life is primarily intellectual: everything man needs has to be discovered by his mind and produced by his effort Ayn Rand Sayings |
| The American businessmen, as a class, have demonstrated the greatest productive genius and the most spectacular achievements ever recorded in the economic history of mankind. What reward did they receive from our culture and its intellectuals? The position of a hated, persecuted minority. The position of a scapegoat for the evils of the bureaucrats. Ayn Rand Quotations |
| The Argument from Intimidation is a confession of intellectual impotence. Ayn Rand |
| The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it. Ayn Rand Popular Quotes |
| The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive - a definition that invalidates man's consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence. The good, say the mystics of muscle, is Society - a thing which they define as an organism that possesses no physical form, a super-being embodied in no one in particular and everyone in general except yourself.... The purpose of man's life, say both, is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question. Ayn Rand Quotes |
| The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive - a definition that invalidates man's consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence. The good, say the mystics of muscle, is Society - a thing which they define as an organism that possesses no physical form, a super-being embodied in no one in particular and everyone in general except yourself.... The purpose of man's life, say both, is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question. Ayn Rand |
| The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see. Ayn Rand |
| The idea that 'the public interest' supersedes private interests and rights can have but one meaning: that the interests and rights of some individuals take precedence over the interests and rights of others. Ayn Rand |
| The ladder of success is best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity. Ayn Rand Sayings |
| The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap. Ayn Rand |
| 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. Ayn Rand Remarks |
| The only purpose of education is to teach a student how to live his life-by developing his mind and equipping him to deal with reality. The training he needs is theoretical, i.e., conceptual. He has to be taught to think, to understand, to integrate, to prove. He has to be taught the essentials of the knowledge discovered in the past-and he has to be equipped to acquire further knowledge by his own effort. Ayn Rand |
| The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live. Ayn Rand Quotes |
| The purpose of the law is not to prevent a future offense, but to punish the one actually committed Ayn Rand |
| The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me. Ayn Rand Quotations |
| The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. Ayn Rand Quotations |
| The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles. Ayn Rand Quotes |
| The truth is not for all men, but only for those who seek it. Ayn Rand |
| The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other - until one day when they are suddenly declared to be the country's official ideology. Ayn Rand Quotes |
| The worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt. Ayn Rand |
| There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. Ayn Rand |
| There can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob Ayn Rand |
| They proclaim that every man is entitled to exist without labor and, the laws of reality to the contrary notwithstanding, is entitled to receive his "minimum sustenance" his food, his clothes, his shelter, with no effort on his part, as his due and his birthright. To receive it, from whom? Ayn Rand Quotations |
| This is the difference between my morality and hedonism. The standard is not: "that is good which gives me pleasure, just because it gives me pleasure" (which is the standard of the dipsomaniac or the sex-chaser)—but "that is good which is the expression of my moral values, and that gives me pleasure." Since the proper moral code is based on man's nature and his survival, and since joy is the expression of his survival, this form of happiness can have no contradiction in it, it is both 'short range' and 'long range' (as all of man's life has to be), and it leads to the furtherance of his life, not to his destruction. Ayn Rand |
| Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision. Ayn Rand |
| To achieve, you need thought. You have to know what you are doing and that's real power. Ayn Rand Sayings |
| To achieve, you need thought…. You have to know what you are doing and that's real power. Ayn Rand |
| To deal with men by force is as impractical as to deal with nature by persuasion. Ayn Rand Popular Quotes |
| To interpose the threat of physical destruction between a man and his perception of reality, is to negate and paralyze his means of survival; to force him to act against his own judgment, is like forcing him to act against his own sight Ayn Rand Adages |
| To say 'I love you' one must first be able to say the 'I.' Ayn Rand Adages |
| Unjust laws have to be fought ideologically; they cannot be fought or corrected by means of mere disobedience and futile martyrdom Ayn Rand |
| Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future. Ayn Rand |
| We are all brothers under the skin - and I, for one, would be willing to skin humanity to prove it Ayn Rand |
| 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. Ayn Rand Quotes |
| We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality Ayn Rand |
| What do you know and how do you know it? Ayn Rand |
| What is a demanding pleasure that demands the use of ones mind! Not in the sense of problem solving, but in the sense of exercising discrimination, judgment, awareness. Ayn Rand |
| When I die, I hope to go to Heaven, whatever the Hell that is. Ayn Rand |
| When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit. Ayn Rand |
| 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. Ayn Rand |
| When personal judgment is inoperative (or forbidden), men's first concern is not how to choose, but how to justify their choice Ayn Rand |
| Why do they always teach us that it's easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It's the hardest thing in the world--to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want. Ayn Rand |
| “Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction.” Ayn Rand |
