Ayn Rand Quotes

856 quotes in 7410 categories

• You must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the secondary…
• The doctrine that 'human rights' are superior to 'property rights' simply means that some human beings have the right to make property out of others.
• I hold that such a question can never arise except in a society of cannibals.
• Since there is no such entity as 'the public,' since the public is merely a number of individuals, the idea that 'the public interest' supersedes…
• Creation comes before distribution - or there will be nothing to distribute. The need of the creator comes before the need of any possible beneficiary.…
• The government was set to protect man from criminals, and the Constitution was written to protect man from the government.
• If you tell an ugly woman that she is beautiful, you offer her the great homage of corrupting the concept of beauty.
• Even if smog were a risk to human life, we must remember that life in nature, without technology, is wholesale death.
• Statism needs war; a free country does not. Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by producing.
• This is the age othe common man, they tell us-a title which any man may claim to the extent osuch distinction as he has managed…
• 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…
• Why is it immoral for you to desire, but moral for others to do so? Why is it immoral to produce a value and keep…
• Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equalled the carnage perpetrated by…
• 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.
• The desire not to be anything is the desire not to be.
• 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…
• Kill reverence and you've killed the hero in man.
• Honest people are never touchy about the matter of being trusted
• An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.
• God help us, ma'am! Do you see what we saw? We saw that we'd been given a law to live by, a moral law, they…

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