Ayn Rand Quotes

In this world, either you're virtuous or you enjoy yourself. Not both, lady, not both.

Value is that which one acts to gain and/or keep. Virtue is the act by which one aims and/or keeps it.

Errors of knowledge are not breaches of morality; no proper moral code can demand infallibility or omniscience.

One must never fail to pronounce moral judgment.

Don't worry. They're all against me. But I have one advantage: they don't know what they want. I do.

Life is a value to be bought and thinking is the only coin noble enough to buy it.

Ideas, in a free society, are not a crime- and neither can they serve as the justification of a crime.

I saw that evil was impotent—that evil was the irrational, the blind, the anti-real—and that the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it.

Civilization does not have to perish. The brutes are winning only by default.

In order to be in control of your life, you have to have a purpose-a productive purpose.

You don't build for the way people live, but for the way they should live. I don't write about people as they are, but as they could be and should be.

Freedom of association includes the freedom not to associate.

Her face lay still on the air under his face.

Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever.

I am an intransigent atheist, though not a militant one. This means that I am not fighting against religion - I am fighting for reason.

The word which can never die on this earth, for it is the heart of it and the meaning and the glory. The sacred word: EGO.

To discuss evil in a manner implying neutrality, is to sanction it.

Collectivism, as an intellectual power and a moral ideal, is dead. But freedom and individualism, and their political expression, capitalism, have not yet been discovered.

You'd let the whole world perish rather than soil that immaculate self of yours with a single spot of which you'd have to be ashamed.

Degrees do not matter... one does not bargain about inches of evil.

That which exists possesses identity; he could keep it out of existence by refusing to identify it.

A rational man knows-or makes it a point to discover-the source of his emotions, the basic premises from which they come.

One must never allow oneself to acquire an exaggerated sense of one's own importance. There's no necessity to burden oneself with absolutes

I can't compete and when I do, the rules of engagement change in the middle of the game. I'll let the powers that be vanquish themselves and return in three to five years to sift through the remains.

It is not as late as you think. It is merely early - in the age of the rebirth of individualism.

Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.

Do not set out to write with your eyes on the box office. It can't be done.

you are never called upon to prove a negative. that's a law of logic.

Today we have discovered the word that could not be said. "I

Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade.

They talked about nothing in particular, sentences that had meaning only in the sound of the voices, in warm gaiety, in the ease of complete relaxation.

She's a writer. The kind of writer who wouldn't be published outside. She believes that when one deals with words, one deals with the mind.

That time and those people are upon you!

One can't love man without hating most of the creatures who pretend to bear his name.

but their eyes were as cold blue glass buttons.

We'll meet again. We'll meet when years have passed, and years make such a difference, don't they?

It's such a waste to be subtle and vicious with people who don't even know that you're being subtle and vicious

What I am fighting is the idea that charity is a moral duty and a primary virtue.

What objectivity and the study of philosophy requires is not an 'open mind,' but an active mind - a mind able and eagerly willing to examine ideas, but to examine them criticially.

Pleasure is nought but virtue's gayer name-- I wrong her still, I rate her worth too low: Virtue the root, and pleasure is the flow'r.

There is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone.

My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists - and in a single choice: to live.

Don't bother to examine a folly-ask yourself only what it accomplishes.

Im waiting, for what, my kind of people, what kind is that, i can tell my kind of people by their faces, by something in their faces.

Patience is always rewarded and romance is always round the corner!

It's so graceless, being a martyr. It's honoring your adversaries too much.

It is one's own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns, and derives from love.

Married people dont look like they have bedrooms on their minds when they look at each other. In this world, either you're virtuous or you enjoy yourself. Not both...Not both.

Man cannot demand that others give up their lives to make him happy.

The virtue involved in helping those one loves is not 'selflessness' or 'sacrifice,' but integrity.