Quotes

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.
-Ayn Rand

Mediocrity doesn't mean average intelligence, it means an average intelligence that resents and envies its betters.
-Ayn Rand

God... a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive.
-Ayn Rand

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

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

Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins.
-Ayn Rand

Thinking men cannot be ruled.
-Ayn Rand

compromise on basic principles.
-Ayn Rand

The purpose of man's life...is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question.
-Ayn Rand

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

Evil requires the sanction of the victim.
-Ayn Rand

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

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

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

Learn to value yourself, which means: to fight for your happiness.
-Ayn Rand

I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.
-Ayn Rand

Rationality is the recognition of the fact that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it.
-Ayn Rand

I don't build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.
-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

Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.
-Ayn Rand

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

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

Capitalism is our only moral system. All other systems take advantage of man's rights and liberties.
-Ayn Rand

Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man's values, it has to be earned.
-Ayn Rand