100 (Controversial) Ayn Rand Quotes

Ayn Rand, born Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum (1905 – 1982) was a controversial Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter. She completed her education in Russia and moved to the United States in 1926. After two early novels that were initially unsuccessful, she achieved fame with her 1943 novel, The Fountainhead. In 1957, Rand published her best-known work, the novel Atlas Shrugged. Afterward, she turned to non-fiction to promote her philosophy, publishing her own periodicals and releasing several collections of essays until her death in 1982.

Ayn Rand is known for developing a philosophical system she called Objectivism. Rand advocated reason as the only means of acquiring knowledge and rejected faith and religion. She supported rational and ethical egoism and rejected altruism. In politics, she condemned the initiation of force as immoral and opposed collectivism and statism as well as anarchism, instead supporting laissez-faire capitalism, which she defined as the system based on recognizing individual rights, including property rights. In art, Rand promoted romantic realism. She was critical of most philosophers and philosophical traditions known to her, except for Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and classical liberals. Literary critics received Rand’s fiction with mixed reviews and academia generally ignored or rejected her philosophy, though academic interest has increased in recent decades. The Objectivist movement attempts to spread her ideas and quotes, both to the public and in academic settings.

Short Quotes by Ayn Rand

• I am. I think. I will. Ayn Rand
• The world you desire can be won. Ayn Rand
• I think, therefore I’ll think. Ayn Rand

• Freedom (n.): To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing. Ayn Rand
• If it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing. Ayn Rand
• Worry is a waste of emotional reserve. Ayn Rand
• Civilization is the process of setting man free from men. Ayn Rand
• Never ask people about your work. Ayn Rand
• Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea. 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
• It is not death that we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to live. Ayn Rand
• The secrets of this earth are not for all men to see, but only for those who will seek them. Ayn Rand
• One loses everything when one loses one’s sense of humor. Ayn Rand
• The more you learn, the more you know that you know nothing. Within the extent of your knowledge, you are right. Ayn Rand

• Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants. Ayn Rand
• Don’t think. Believe. Trust your heart, not your brain. Don’t think. Feel. Believe. Ayn Rand

 

Ayn Rand’s Inspiring Quotes

• Learn to value yourself, which means: fight for your happiness. Ayn Rand
• I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle. Ayn Rand
• The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me. Ayn Rand
• 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
• Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life. Ayn Rand

• Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be left waiting for us in our graves-or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth. Ayn Rand
• Never think of pain or danger or enemies a moment longer than is necessary to fight them. Ayn Rand
• A rational man never distorts or corrupts his own standards and judgment in order to appeal to the irrationality, stupidity, or dishonesty of others. Ayn Rand
• What greater wealth is there than to own your life and to spend it on growing? Every living thing must grow. It can’t stand still. It must grow or perish. Ayn Rand
• But there are people who’ll try to hurt you through the good they see in you ― knowing that it’s the good, needing it and punishing you for it. Don’t let it break you when you discover that. Ayn Rand
• I don’t wish to be the symbol of anything. I’m only myself. Ayn Rand
• Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed. Ayn Rand
• We are on strike against self-immolation. We are on strike against the creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties. We are on strike against the dogma that the pursuit of one’s happiness is evil. We are on strike against the doctrine that life is guilt. Ayn Rand
• If you don’t know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn. Ayn Rand

• The truth is not for all men but only for those who seek it. Ayn Rand
• It’s not that I don’t suffer, it’s that I know the unimportance of suffering. I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one’s soul and as a permanent scar across one’s view of existence. Ayn Rand
• But why should you care what people will say? All you have to do is please yourself. Ayn Rand
• I never found beauty in longing for the impossible and never found the possible to be beyond my reach. Ayn Rand
• 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
• It is not advisable to venture unsolicited opinions. You should spare yourself the embarrassing discovery of their exact value to your listener. Ayn Rand
• You have been called selfish for the courage of acting on your own judgement and bearing sole responsibility for your own life. You have been called arrogant for your independent mind. You have been called cruel for your unyielding integrity. You have been called anti social for the vision that made you venture upon undiscovered roads. Ayn Rand
• If one’s actions are honest, one does not need the predated confidence of others. Ayn Rand
• Self respect is something that can’t be killed. The worst thing is to kill a man’s pretense at it. Ayn Rand
• Well, I always know what I want. And when you know what you want ― you go toward it. Sometimes you go very fast, and sometimes only an inch a year. Perhaps you feel happier when you go fast. I don’t know. I’ve forgotten the difference long ago, because it really doesn’t matter, so long as you move. Ayn Rand

• I take no pride in hopeless longing; I wouldn’t hold a stillborn aspiration. I’d want to have it, to make it, to live it. Ayn Rand
• What is morality, she asked. Judgement to distinguish right and wrong, vision to see the truth, and courage to act upon it, dedication to that which is good, integrity to stand by the good at any price. Ayn Rand

Insightful Quotes by Ayn Rand

• Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind. Ayn Rand
• If one doesn’t respect oneself one can have neither love nor respect for others. 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

• The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see. Ayn Rand
• Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone. Ayn Rand
• To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That’s what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul – would you understand why that’s much harder? Ayn Rand
• A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others. Ayn Rand
• The most depraved type of human being is the man without a purpose. Ayn Rand

• Rationalization is a process of not perceiving reality, but of attempting to make reality fit one’s emotions. Ayn Rand
• There’s nothing as significant as a human face. Nor as eloquent. We can never really know another person, except by our first glance at him. Because, in that glance, we know everything. Even though we’re not always wise enough to unravel the knowledge. Ayn Rand
• I worship individuals for their highest possibilities as individuals and I loathe humanity for its failure to live up to these possibilities. Ayn Rand
• Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death. Ayn Rand
• Let me give you a tip on a clue to men’s characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it. Ayn Rand

• The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live. Ayn Rand
• She knew that even pain can be confessed, but to confess happiness is to stand naked, delivered to the witness. Ayn Rand
• Every form of happiness is private. Our greatest moments are personal, self-motivated, not to be touched. Ayn Rand
• The measure of hell you’re able to endure is the measure of your love. Ayn Rand

 

Ayn Rand’s Cynical Quotes

• I could die for you. But I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, live for you. Ayn Rand

• The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone. 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
• My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose. Ayn Rand
• There’s no way to rule innocent men. 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
• When I die I hope to go to heaven ― whatever that is ― and I want to be able to afford the price of admission. Ayn Rand
• Men who reject the responsibility of thought and reason can only exist as parasites on the thinking of others. Ayn Rand
• In a free society, one does not have to deal with those who are irrational. One is free to avoid them. Ayn Rand

Photo by Ian Espinosa

• People don’t want to think. And the deeper they get into trouble, the less they want to think. But by some sort of instinct, they feel that they ought to and it makes them feel guilty. So they’ll bless and follow anyone who gives them a justification for not thinking. Anyone who makes a virtue – a highly intellectual virtue – out of what they know to be their sin, their weakness and their guilt… They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don’t know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear. Ayn Rand
• What is man? He’s just a collection of chemicals with delusions of grandeur. Ayn Rand
• I don’t want to see you. I don’t like you. I don’t like your face. You look like an insufferable egotist. You’re impertinent. You’re too sure of yourself. Twenty years ago I would have punched your face with the greatest of pleasure. Ayn Rand
• Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer – and that is the way he has acted through most of his history. Ayn Rand
• Love should be treated like a business deal, but every business deal has its own terms and its own currency. And in love, the currency is virtue. You love people not for what you do for them or what they do for you. You love them for the values, the virtues, which they have achieved in their own character. 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
• Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong. Ayn Rand
• There is no such thing as a lousy job – only lousy men who don’t care to do it. Ayn Rand
• In this world, either you’re virtuous or you enjoy yourself. Not both. Ayn Rand

 

Intellectual Quotes by 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
• I can accept anything, except what seems to be the easiest for most people: the half-way, the almost, the just-about, the in-between. Ayn Rand
• Devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality; there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking. Ayn Rand
• I know not if this earth on which I stand is the core of the universe or if it is but a speck of dust lost in eternity. I know not and I care not. For I know what happiness is possible to me on earth. And my happiness needs no higher aim to vindicate it. My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose. Ayn Rand
• No speech is ever considered, but only the speaker. It’s so much easier to pass judgement on a man than on an idea. Ayn Rand
• People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked. The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on. There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all. Ayn Rand
• At first, man was enslaved by the gods. But he broke their chains. Then he was enslaved by the kings. But he broke their chains. He was enslaved by his birth, by his kin, by his race. But he broke their chains. He declared to all his brothers that a man has rights which neither god nor king nor other men can take away from him, no matter what their number, for his is the right of man, and there is no right on earth above this right. And he stood on the threshold of freedom for which the blood of the centuries behind him had been spilled. Ayn Rand
• I do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and I do not live in chronic dread of disaster. It is no happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that I regard as the abnormal exception in Human Life. Ayn Rand
• A viler evil than to murder a man, is to sell him suicide as an act of virtue. Ayn Rand
• I stand here on the summit of the mountain. I lift my head and I spread my arms. This, my body and spirit, this is the end of the quest. I wished to know the meaning of all things. I am the meaning. I wished to find a warrant for being. I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction. Neither am I the means to any end others may wish to accomplish. I am not a tool for their use. I am not a servant of their needs. I am not a sacrifice on their alters. Ayn Rand

 

Romantic Quotes by Ayn Rand

• I love you so much that nothing can matter to me – not even you…Only my love – not your answer. Not even your indifference. Ayn Rand
• You have been the one encounter in my life that can never be repeated. Ayn Rand
• He wanted her. He knew where to find her. He waited. It amused him to wait, because he knew that the waiting was unbearable to her. He knew that his absence bound her to him in a manner more complete and humiliating than his presence could enforce. He was giving her time to attempt an escape, in order to let her know her own helplessness when he chose to see her again. Ayn Rand
• Patience is always rewarded and romance is always round the corner. Ayn Rand
• He, too, stood looking at her for a moment–and it seemed to her that it was not a look of greeting after an absence, but the look of someone who had thought of her every day of that year. 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

 

Poetic Quotes by Ayn Rand

• Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artists metaphysical value judgments. Ayn Rand
• People want nothing but mirrors around them. To reflect them while they’re reflecting too … Reflections of reflections and echoes of echoes. No beginning and no end. No center and no purpose. Ayn Rand
• The worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt. Ayn Rand

Photo by Bryan Minear

• She did not know the nature of her loneliness. The only words that named it were: This is not the world I expected. Ayn Rand
• Joy is the goal of existence, and joy is not to be stumbled upon, but to be achieved, and the act of treason is to let its vision drown in the swamp of the moment’s torture. Ayn Rand
• It was the greatest sensation of existence: not to trust but to know. 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
• Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul parish, in lonely frustration, for the life you deserved but never have been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desire can be won. It exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours. Ayn Rand

 

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