Quotes by Ayn Rand

About Ayn Rand:

Ayn Rand is known for her two best-selling novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and for developing a philosophical system she called Objectivism. Born and educated in Russia, Rand moved to the United States in 1926. She had a play produced on Broadway in 1935–1936. After two early novels that were initially unsuccessful in America, she achieved fame with her 1943 novel, The Fountainhead.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

I love doing it. Every building is like a person. Single and unrepeatable.

Ayn Rand

You'll get everything society can give a man. You'll keep all the money. You'll take any fame or honor anyone might want to grant. You'll accept such gratitude as the tenants might feel. And I - I'll take what nobody can give a man, except himself. I...

Ayn Rand

Now take a human body. Why wouldn't you like to see a human body with a curling tail with a crest of ostrich feathers at the end? And with ears shaped like acanthus leaves? It would be ornamental, you know, instead of the stark, bare ugliness we have...

Ayn Rand

What in hell are you really made of, Howard? After all, it's only a building. It's not the combination of holy sacrament, Indian torture, and sexual ecstasy that you seem to make of it." "Isn't it?

Ayn Rand

Keating stood still, because he understood for the first time what it was that artists spoke about when they spoke of beauty.

Ayn Rand

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

Ayn Rand

From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man—the function of his reasoning mind.

Ayn Rand

He wanted nothing, for the time being, except to understand .... Without advice, assistance or plan, he began reading an incongruous assortment of books; he would find some passage which he could not understand in one book, and he would get another o...

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 audience. You can't fake it in your own eyes. Your ego is your strictest judge. They run from it. They spend their lives running. It's easier to donate ...

Ayn Rand

Stand here, he thought, and count the lighted windows of a city. You cannot do it. But behind each yellow rectangle that climbs, one over another, to the sky - under each bulb - down to there, see that spark over the river which is not a star? - ther...

Ayn Rand

Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

Ayn Rand

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

Ayn Rand

Government 'help' to business is just as disastrous as government persecution... the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off.

Ayn Rand

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 valu...

Ayn Rand

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

Ayn Rand

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

Ayn Rand

Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.

Ayn Rand

Do 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

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.

Ayn Rand

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.

Ayn Rand

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 rul...

Ayn Rand

Author Bio

  • NameAyn Rand
  • DescriptionRussian-American novelist and philosopher
  • BornFebruary 2, 1905
  • DiedMarch 6, 1982
  • CountryUnited States Of America; Russian Empire; Soviet Union
  • ProfessionWriter; Philosopher; Novelist; Economist
  • WorksAtlas Shrugged; The Fountainhead
  • AwardsPrometheus Award; Prometheus Award - Hall Of Fame