Quotes By Ayn Rand

Every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics - a rational ethics - as a precondition of rebirth.

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.

Rights are not a matter of numbers - and there can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob.

Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values.

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.

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

The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.

To achieve, you need thought. You have to know what you are doing and that's real power.

If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.

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.

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.

The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap.

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.

Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.

Man's unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself.

When I die, I hope to go to Heaven, whatever the Hell that is.

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.

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.

The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.

The worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt.

Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice.

Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason.

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.

Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think.

Do not ever say that the desire to "do good" by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.

Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.

There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.

The ladder of success is best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity.