Here are the best quotes from Ayn Rand (1905-1982), an American writer of Russian Jewish origin, widely known for having written the best-selling The Spring and The Atlas Rebellion, and for having developed a philosophical system that she called "Objectivism."
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-I never found beauty in the yearning for the impossible and I never found the possible beyond my reach.
-The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone.
-The truth is not for everyone, but for those who seek it.
-I adore individuals for their highest possibilities as individuals and I detest humanity for its inability to live according to these possibilities.
-Every living being must grow. He cannot stand still. It must grow or perish.
-The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy and live.
-If someone's actions are honest, they do not need the trust of others.
-It is not death that we want to avoid, it is life that we want to live.
-The most depraved type of human being is the man without a purpose.
- Reaching life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.
-The more you learn, the more you know that you don't know anything.
-Do it first and feel it later.
-Learn to value yourself, which means: fight for your happiness.
-There is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion, than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.
-A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve his goals, not by the desire to beat others.
-I swear on my life and my love for her, that I will never live for the good of another man, nor will I ask another man to live for mine.
-The smallest minority on Earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be advocates of minorities.
-The question is not who is going to leave me, but who is going to stop me.
-If you don't know, you shouldn't be scared, but rather learn.
-If you don't respect yourself, you can't have love or respect for others.
-Civilization is the process of liberating man from men.
-The contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will realize that one of them is wrong.
-My happiness is not the means to achieve any end. It is an end in itself. It is your own goal. It is its own purpose.
-Selling your soul is the easiest thing in the world. It's what everyone does every hour of their life. If I asked you to save your soul, would you understand why it is so much more difficult?
-The man who curses money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.
-If it is worth doing, it is worth demanding.
-A government is the most dangerous threat to human rights: it has a legal monopoly on the use of physical force that it can use against legally unarmed victims.
-Why do you care what people say? All you have to do is please yourself.
-People create their own questions because they are afraid to look ahead. All you have to do is look ahead and see the road, and when you see it, don't stare, walk.
-The worst guilt is accepting an unearned guilt.
-Run for your life when you meet a man who tells you that money is bad. That phrase is the leper's bell of an oncoming looter.
-Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and continue to expand it to the limit of your life.
-Integrity is the ability to sustain an idea.
-Patience is always rewarded and romance is always around the corner.
-The joy is the goal of existence, it should not be run over, but reached.
-Rationalization is not a process of perception of reality, but an attempt to make reality fit your emotions.
-Have you ever felt the desire to find someone you can admire?
-Money is just a tool. It will take you where you want, but it will not replace you as the driver of your life.
-Even pain can be confessed, but to confess happiness is to be naked.
-What is man? It's just a collection of chemicals with delusions of grandeur.
- Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and should not be sacrificed.
-The men who reject the responsibility of thought and reason can only exist as parasites in the thinking of others.
-In this world, either you are virtuous or you have fun. Not both, ma'am, not both.
-You lose everything when you lose your sense of humor.
-Do not think. Believe. Trust your heart, not your brain. Do not think. Feel. Believe.
-Within the scope of your knowledge, you are right.
-The reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it.
-The lust for power is a weed that grows only on the vacant grounds of an abandoned mind.
-How much you can take from hell is the measure of your love.
-Are you here. It's our time and our life, not yours. Don't fight not to be happy. You are.
-I don't want to be the symbol of anything. I'm just me.
-It is not advisable to venture into unsolicited opinions. You should save yourself the embarrassing discovery of your exact value to your listener.
-Money cannot buy happiness for a man who does not have a notion of what he wants.
-The greatest sensation of existence is not to trust, but to know.
-When I die I hope to go to heaven - whatever it is - and I want to be able to pay the admission price.
-A greater evil than the murder of a man is to sell suicide as an act of virtue.
-Each form of happiness is private. Our best moments are personal, self-motivated.
-There are two sides to every problem: one side is correct and the other is incorrect, but the middle is always bad.
-In a free society, you don't have to deal with those who are irrational. There is freedom to avoid them.
-You have been called cruel for your inflexible integrity.
-Money is a tool of exchange, which cannot exist unless there are goods produced and men capable of producing them.
- I do not believe that the tragedy is our natural destiny and I do not live in the chronic fear of the disaster. It is not happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural.
-First, man was enslaved by the gods. But he broke his chains. Then he was enslaved by the kings. But he broke his chains. He was enslaved by his birth, by his relatives, by his race. But he broke his chains.
-I believe. I am. I will do.
-It is much easier to judge a man than an idea.
-People want nothing more than mirrors around them. To be reflected while they are reflected. Reflections of the reflection and echo of the echoes. Without a beginning or an end. Without center and without purpose.
-The worry is a waste of emotional reserve.
-A rational man never distorts or corrupts his own standards and judgments to appeal to the irrationality, stupidity or dishonesty of others.
-I don't know if this Earth I'm on is the nucleus of the universe or if it's just a particle of dust lost in eternity. I don't know and I don't care. Because I know the happiness that is possible for me on Earth.
-Man is the only living species that has the power to act as its own destroyer, and has acted that way for most of its history.
-We are all brothers under the skin. I, for example, would be willing to skin humanity to prove it.
-I came here to say that I do not recognize the right of anyone to have a minute of my life.
-There are no differences between communism and socialism, except the sense of achieving an ultimate goal. On the one hand, communism aims to enslave people by force and on the other, socialism aims to enslave them through the vote.
-The difference between communism and socialism is that one is a murder, and the other is a suicide.
-The only moral purpose of life is the achievement of your happiness, and that happiness is the proof of your integrity and the result of the loyalty of your values.
-Never allow your fire to go out, do not let the hero who remains within you get lost in the lonely frustration of life just because of the reproach of thinking about the life you deserve to achieve.
-The world you want can be had, it exists, it is real, possible and it can be yours.
-An individualistic person is one who says: "I will not rule or be governed, I will not be a master but not a slave and above all else, I will never sacrifice myself for anyone."
-Ask yourself if the dream of paradise and greatness should be waiting for us in our graves, or if it should rather be ours here and now on earth.
-We can try to avoid reality, but we cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding that reality.
-The ego of a man can become a resource for human progress.
-Free competition is an absurd contradiction of terms when it is imposed by law.
-Civilization is the progress towards a privacy society.
-The entire existence of a wild community is public and is governed by the laws of its tribe.
-The only domain that any government has is the power to take measures or punish criminals.
-When there are not enough criminals, the government makes them.
-There are so many things that are crimes that it becomes impossible for men to try to live without violating any law.
-The mind and force are contrary, that is why morality ends just where a weapon begins.
-An effective way to climb the ladder of success is to try to step on the steps of opportunity.
-If you know that this life is all you have, why don't you make the most of it?
-I am not a main defender of selfishness but a great defender of reason. If you constantly recognize the superiority of reason and constantly apply it, everything else flows quickly.
-Never mention that the desire to do good by force is a good reason.
-If a man who is dedicated to business makes a mistake, he is in charge of suffering the consequences, on the contrary, if a bureaucrat makes a mistake, the one who suffers the consequences is yourself.
-To say 'I love you', you must first be able to say 'I'.
-The most difficult thing to explain is all the obvious that the world has decided not to see.
-Prayers only make sense in the sound of voices that enjoy warm joy.
-We are aware that we are going to destroy. Never pretend that you are going to change people's opinions by affirming that we are committing an act of virtue.
-The greatest reward of man is that while animals survive by adapting to their antecedents, men survive by adapting to themselves.
-Money has become an instrument to measure the virtue of a society.
-Everyone in the world has the right to make their own decisions, but no one has the right to force their decision on other people.
-When you observe that corruption is rewarded and that honesty becomes a self-sacrifice, it is easy to recognize that your society is doomed to failure.
-I don't build to have clients, I have clients to build.
-Everyone is free to avoid reality and stumble blindly on any path, but no one is free to avoid the precipice that he refuses to see.
-Only a man who does not need it, is able to inherit wealth.
-The difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is only a matter of time.
-If men let a leader determine their lives, the cost will be: to have a society towed by a pile of junk.
-There is a lower level of cowardice in conformists, these are the fashionable non-conformists.
-In the course of the years there were men who took the first steps to create new paths. These men, they armed themselves with nothing more than their own vision.
-Never think about pain in danger or enemies more than is necessary to fight them.
-Wealth is the result of the individual's ability to think.
-Individual rights are never subject to a public vote.
-Don't allow any man to run as a defender of peace if he supports any social system that agrees to the use of force against men.
-I am going to give you a clue about the personalities of men: the man who censors money, has obtained it dishonorably and the man who respects money, has earned it honorably.
-She did not recognize the nature of her loneliness until she realized that she lived in a world she did not expect.
-I love you so much that what can matter most to me is my love, not your answer and not even your indifference.
-If a civilization wishes to prevail over time and survive, it must consider that the main thing that men have to reject is the morality of altruism.
-Why do you care so much what people say? What you must always do is please your own essence.
-The sexual choice of a person is the consequence and the sum of their convictions. Tell me what a person considers sexually attractive and I will tell you their main philosophy of life.
-The ballet is a perfect medium for the expression of spiritual love.