Ayn Rand quote: "America's abundance was not created by public sacrifices to "the common good", but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes"

Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins.
AYN RAND

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public...
AYN RAND

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

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

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

Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not pain o...
AYN RAND

To say 'I love you' one must first be able to say the 'I.'
AYN RAND

Envy is the only name she could find for the monstrous thing she faced, but it was much worse...
AYN RAND

Love is an expression and assertion of self-esteem, a response to one's own values in the person of ...
AYN RAND

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

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

Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think.
AYN RAND

Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises....
AYN RAND

He had always wanted to write Music and he could give no other identity to the thing he sought. If y...
AYN RAND

Money is the barometer of a society's virtue.
AYN RAND

To achieve, you need thought. You have to know what you are doing and that's real power.
AYN RAND

America's abundance was created not by public sacrifices to the common good, but by the productive g...
AYN RAND

Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a paymen...
AYN RAND

Im waiting, for what, my kind of people, what kind is that, i can tell my kind of people by their fa...
AYN RAND

The American businessmen, as a class, have demonstrated the greatest productive genius and the most ...
AYN RAND

There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on...
AYN RAND

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

It's easy to run to others. It's so hard to stand on one's own record. You can fake virtue for an au...
AYN RAND

People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an ac...
AYN RAND

...Aren’t they all acting on a selfish motive—to be noticed, liked, admired?”
“—by ot...
AYN RAND

Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live-...
AYN RAND

Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. But, i...
AYN RAND

Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, t...
AYN RAND

Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but t...
AYN RAND

Do you know the hallmark of a second rater? It's resentment of another man's achievement. Those touc...
AYN RAND

Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but...
AYN RAND

Fransisco, you're some kind of very high nobility, aren't you?" He answered, "Not yet. The reason my...
AYN RAND

People want nothing but mirrors around them. To reflect them while they’re reflecting too ... Refl...
AYN RAND

She thought how strange it would be if she ever said 'Hello' to him. One did not greet oneself each ...
AYN RAND

I've always thought that a feeling which changes never existed in the first place.
AYN RAND

Why do they always teach us that it's easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline t...
AYN RAND

Freedom (n.): To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.
AYN RAND

I love you so much that nothing can matter to me - not even you...Only my love- not your answer. Not...
AYN RAND

If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing.
AYN RAND

I could die for you. But I couldn't, and wouldn't, live for you.
AYN RAND

To say ‘I love you’ one must first know how to say the ‘I.’ The meaning of the ‘I’ is an...
AYN RAND

Learn to value yourself, which means: fight for your happiness.
AYN RAND

To deal with men by force is as impractical as to deal with nature by persuasion.
AYN RAND

The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.
AYN RAND

This is the difference between my morality and hedonism. The standard is not: that is good which giv...
AYN RAND

Man's consciousness is his least known and most abused vital organ. Most people believe that conscio...
AYN RAND

What is a demanding pleasure that demands the use of ones mind! Not in the sense of problem solving,...
AYN RAND

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

Do not consider Collectivists as sincere but deluded idealists. The proposal to enslave some men for...
AYN RAND

The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man'...
AYN RAND

A chronic lack of pleasure, of any enjoyable, rewarding or stimulating experiences, produces a slow,...
AYN RAND

All public interest legislation (and any distribution of money taken by force from some men for the ...
AYN RAND

If you agree with some tenets of Objectivism, but disagree with others, do not call yourself an Obje...
AYN RAND

Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property righ...
AYN RAND

There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.
AYN RAND

That which you call your soul or spirit is your conciousness, and that which you call 'free will' is...
AYN RAND

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

An emotion is an automatic response, an automatic effect of man's value premises. An effect, not a c...
AYN RAND

Upper classes are a nation's past, the middle class its future.
AYN RAND

The basic principle of altruism is that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to ...
AYN RAND

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

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

When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will lear...
AYN RAND

Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but...
AYN RAND

From the smallest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, ...
AYN RAND

It only stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrificial of...
AYN RAND

People create their own questions because they are afraid to look straight. All you have to do is lo...
AYN RAND

So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of all money?
AYN RAND

"Mediocrity" doesn't mean average intelligence, it means an average intelligence that resents and en...
AYN RAND

Contrary to the vulgar belief that men are motivated primarily by materialistic considerations, we n...
AYN RAND

Thinking men cannot be ruled.
AYN RAND

"Mediocrity" doesn't mean average intelligence, it means an average intelligence that resents and en...
AYN RAND

Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.
AYN RAND

Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you...
AYN RAND

Reality confronts man with a great many "musts," but all of them are conditional; the formula of rea...
AYN RAND

The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't e...
AYN RAND

Capitalism is our only moral system. All other systems take advantage of man's rights and liberties...
AYN RAND

Government "help" to business is just as disastrous as government persecution... the only way a gove...
AYN RAND

A government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of p...
AYN RAND

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.
AYN RAND

...The purpose of man's life...is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know,...
AYN RAND

A culture is made -- or destroyed -- by its articulate voices.
AYN RAND

Man is a being with free will; therefore, each man is potentially good or evil, and it's up to him a...
AYN RAND

Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think.
AYN RAND

Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth, the man who would make his fortune no m...
AYN RAND

We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality
AYN RAND

To say "I love you" one must know first how to say the "I".
AYN RAND

When personal judgment is inoperative (or forbidden), men's first concern is not how to choose, but ...
AYN RAND

There is only one path to Heaven. On Earth, we call it Love.
AYN RAND

Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting for us in our graves - or w...
AYN RAND

Love should be treated like a business deal, but every business deal has its own terms and its own c...
AYN RAND

Integrity is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your consciousness, just as honesty is...
AYN RAND

A house can have integrity, just like a person,' said Roark, 'and just as seldom.
AYN RAND

Thousands of years ago the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burnt at the stake...
AYN RAND

Only a man of integrity can possess the virtue of honesty, since only the faking of one’s consciou...
AYN RAND

Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishono...
AYN RAND

Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea.
AYN RAND

The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone.
AYN RAND

Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights ...
AYN RAND

If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.
AYN RAND

Potentially, a government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights: it holds a legal monopol...
AYN RAND

The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren'...
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

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

The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to b...
AYN RAND

The worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt.
AYN RAND

To achieve, you need thought. You have to know what you are doing and that's real power.
AYN RAND

When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is learning to understand a...
AYN RAND

Degrees of ability vary, but the basic principle remains the same: the degree of a man's independenc...
AYN RAND

Don't fool yourself, my dear. You're much worse than a bitch. You're a saint. Which shows why saints...
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 ego...
AYN RAND

There’s nothing as significant as a human face. Nor as eloquent. We can never really know another ...
AYN RAND

Man's unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their bac...
AYN RAND

From the smallest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, ...
AYN RAND

Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave th...
AYN RAND

We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free ...
AYN RAND

Money is the barometer of a society's virtue.
AYN RAND

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

Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's be...
AYN RAND

Anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today.
AYN RAND

Since knowledge, thinking, and rational action are properties of the individual, since the choice to...
AYN RAND

Happiness is not to be achieved at the command of emotional whims. Happiness is not the satisfaction...
AYN RAND

No, you do not have to live as a man; it is an act of moral choice. But you cannot live as anything ...
AYN RAND

Rationality is the recognition of the fact that existence exists, that nothing can alter the truth a...
AYN RAND

Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing...
AYN RAND

The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the m...
AYN RAND

I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask a...
AYN RAND

We are all brothers under the skin - and I, for one, would be willing to skin humanity to prove it.
AYN RAND

Government 'help' to business is just as disastrous as government persecution... the only wa...
AYN RAND

Of course I need you. I go insane when I see you. You can do almost anything you wish with me. Is th...
AYN RAND

He, too, stood looking at her for a moment--and it seemed to her that it was not a look of greeting ...
AYN RAND

She did not know the nature of her loneliness. The only words that named it were: This is not the wo...
AYN RAND

The right to vote is a *consequence*, not a primary cause, of a free social system -- and its value ...
AYN RAND

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

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ru...
AYN RAND

Get the hell out of my way!
AYN RAND

The common good of a collective -- a race, a class, a state -- was the claim and justification of ev...
AYN RAND

The Argument from Intimidation is a confession of intellectual impotence.
AYN RAND

The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the mor...
AYN RAND

The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it.
AYN RAND

It is not advisable, James, to venture unsolicited opinions. You should spare yourself the embarrass...
AYN RAND

Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. ...
AYN RAND

That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call 'free will' i...
AYN RAND

Rationality is the recognition of the fact that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take pre...
AYN RAND

Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of mans val...
AYN RAND

I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask ano...
AYN RAND

I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanctio...
AYN RAND

The upper classes are... a nation's past; the middle class is its future.
AYN RAND

Thanksgiving is a typically American holiday...The lavish meal is a symbol of the fact that abundant...
AYN RAND

Learn to value yourself, which means: to fight for your happiness.
AYN RAND

Guilt is a rope that wears thin.
AYN RAND

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

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An ...
AYN RAND

To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That's what everybody does every hour of his li...
AYN RAND

There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is alw...
AYN RAND

The action required to sustain human life is primarily intellectual: everything man needs has to be ...
AYN RAND

A house can have integrity, just like a person
AYN RAND

In that world, you'll be able to rise in the morning with the spirit you had known in your childhood...
AYN RAND

Rights are not a matter of numbers - and there can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actio...
AYN RAND

They proclaim that every man is entitled to exist without labor and, the laws of reality to the cont...
AYN RAND

To interpose the threat of physical destruction between a man and his perception of reality, is to n...
AYN RAND

We are born into this world unarmed---our mind is our only weapon.
AYN RAND

Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the...
AYN RAND

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

Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason.
AYN RAND

There can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permit...
AYN RAND

He thought of all the living species that train their young in the art of survival, the cats who tea...
AYN RAND

"Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is th...
AYN RAND

An Individualist is a man who lives for his own sake and by his own mind; he neither sacrifices hims...
AYN RAND

Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the ...
AYN RAND

If you tell a beautiful woman that she is beautiful, what have you given her? It's no more than a fa...
AYN RAND

We are on strike, we, the men of the mind.

We are on strike against self-immolation. We a...
AYN RAND

All I mean is that a board of directors is one or two ambitious men--and a lot of ballast. I mean th...
AYN RAND

If you write a line of zeroes, it´s still nothing.
AYN RAND

Observe how many people evade, rationalize and drive their minds into a state of blind stupor, in dr...
AYN RAND

If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood ru...
AYN RAND

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

Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed.
AYN RAND

It only stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrif...
AYN RAND

Beauty is a sense of harmony.
AYN RAND

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artists metaphysical value judgments.
AYN RAND

At first, man was enslaved by the gods. But he broke their chains. Then he was enslaved by the kings...
AYN RAND

Dagny leaned back in her chair. The short sentence was a shock. It was not merely relief: it was the...
AYN RAND

In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are at its worst. In th...
AYN RAND

When you are in love, it means that the person you love is of great personal, selfish importance to ...
AYN RAND

I stand here on the summit of the mountain. I lift my head and I spread my arms. This, my body and s...
AYN RAND

If this is vise I want no virtue.

...

I know what happiness is possible to me ...
AYN RAND

A man's sexual choice is the result and the sum of his fundamental convictions.... He will always be...
AYN RAND

He, too, stood looking at her for a moment--and it seemed to her that it was not a look of greeting ...
AYN RAND

Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human l...
AYN RAND

Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental ...
AYN RAND

But why should you care what people will say? All you have to do is please yourself.
AYN RAND

Men have been taught that it is a virtue to agree with others. But the creator is the man who disagr...
AYN RAND

He liked to observe emotions; they were like red lanterns strung along the dark unknown of another's...
AYN RAND

The man who produces while others dispose of his product is a slave.
AYN RAND

The purpose of the law is not to prevent a future offense, but to punish the one actually committed
AYN RAND

Just as man can't exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one'...
AYN RAND

The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted ...
AYN RAND

The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it. - Atlas Shrugged
AYN RAND

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

America's abundance was not created by public sacrifices to "the common good", but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes

Copied!

Ayn Rand

America's abundance was not created by public sacrifices to "the common good", but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes

Ayn Rand

Share:

Related

More Ayn Rand