Author Profile
Ayn Rand
1905 – 1982 • Russian • Writer
55
Total Quotes
Collected Meditations
Showing 55 quotesDo not ever say that the desire to 'do good' by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.— Ayn Rand
Just as man can't exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one's rights into reality, to think, to work and keep the results, which means: the right of property.— Ayn Rand
Every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics - a rational ethics - as a precondition of rebirth.— Ayn Rand
A desire presupposes the possibility of action to achieve it; action presupposes a goal which is worth achieving.— Ayn Rand
The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.— Ayn Rand
Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting for us in our graves - or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.— 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
From the smallest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from one attribute of man - the function of his reasoning mind.— 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
To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one's thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one's mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.— Ayn Rand
Man's unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself.— Ayn Rand
There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.— Ayn Rand
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.— Ayn Rand