Quotes By Ayn Rand

It only stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.

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.

The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me.

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).

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.

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.

A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.

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.

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