Quotes By Ayn Rand

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.

Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).

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

Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth, the man who would make his fortune no matter where he started.

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

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

The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see.

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

To say "I love you" one must first be able to say the "I."

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

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.

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.

Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.

Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter.

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.

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.

The truth is not for all men, but only for those who seek it.

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

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.

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

Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision.

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.

Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future.

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.

Money is the barometer of a society's virtue.