Ayn Rand
The word which can never die on this earth, for it is the heart of it and the meaning and the glory. The sacred word: EGO.Collection: Heart
For centuries, the mystics of spirit had existed by running a protection racket - by making life on earth unbearable, then charging you for consolation and relief, by forbidding all the virtues that make existence possible, then riding on the shoulders of your guilt, by declaring production and joy to be sins, then collecting blackmail from the sinners.Collection: Running
Humor is not an unconditional virtue; its moral character depends on its object. To laugh at the contemptible, is a virtue; to laugh at the good, is a hideous vice. Too often, humor is used as the camouflage of moral cowardice.Collection: Character
If a man wants love he should correct his weaknesses, or his flaws, and he may deserve it. But he cannot expect the unearned, either in love or in money; either in matter or in spirit.Collection: Men
I would step in the way of a bullet if it were aimed at my husband. It is not self-sacrifice to die protecting that which you value: If the value is great enough, you do not care to exist without it.Collection: Love
No advocate of reason can claim the right to force his ideas on others. No advocate of the free mind can claim the right to force the minds of others. No rational society, no co-operation, no agreement, no understanding, no discussion are possible among men who propose to substitute guns for rational persuasion.Collection: Gun
To be the kind of writer you want to be, you must first be the kind of thinker you want to be.Collection: Writing
The worst guilt is to accept an undeserved guilt — and that is what you have been doing all your life.Collection: Witty
Never think of pain or danger or enemies a moment longer than is necessary to fight them.Collection: Pain
The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it.Collection: Evil
every man is free to rise as far as he's able or willing, but the degree to which he thinks determines the degree to which he'll rise.Collection: Inspirational
Economics departments are dominated by Marxism, which is taken straight or on the rocks, in the form of Keynesianism.Collection: Taken
The degree of a country's freedom is the degree of its prosperity.Collection: Country
People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on…There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.Collection: Truth
All the reasons which made the initiation of physical force evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative.Collection: Evil
The greatest threat to mankind and civilization is the spread of the totalitarian philosophy. Its best ally is not the devotion of its followers but the confusion of its enemies. To fight it, we must understand it.Collection: Philosophy
Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force. man had no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle. He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons,and to make weapons - a process of thought. From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and we have comes from a single attribute of man -the function of his reasoning mind.Collection: Religious
Those who grant sympathy to guilt, grant none to innocence.Collection: Guilt
I shall choose friends among men, but neither slaves nor masters. And I shall choose only such as please me, and them I shall love and respect, but neither command nor obey. And we shall join our hands when we wish, or walk alone when we so desire.Collection: Men
No one's happiness but my own is in my power to achieve or to destroy.Collection: Happiness
Laissez-faire capitalism is the only social system based on the recognition of individual rights and, therefore, the only system that bans force from social relationships.Collection: Rights
I can say-not as a patriotic bromide, but with full knowledge of the necessary metaphysical, epistemological , ethical, political and esthetic roots-that the United States of America is the greatest, the noblest and, in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world.Collection: Country
All depressions are caused by government interference and the cure is always offered to take more of the poison that caused the disaster. Depressions are not the result of a free economy.Collection: Government
Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.Collection: Weed
If you know that this life is all that you have, wouldn't you make the most of it?Collection: Life Is
The truly and deliberately evil men are a very small minority; it is the appeaser who unleashes them on mankind; it is the appeaser's intellectual abdication that invites them to take over. When a culture's dominant trend is geared to irrationality, the thugs win over the appeasers. When intellectual leaders fail to foster the best in the mixed, unformed, vacillating character of people at large, the thugs are sure to bring out the worst. When the ablest men turn into cowards, the average men turn into brutes.Collection: Character
It is a free market that makes monopolies impossible.Collection: Liberty
To hold an unchanging youth is to reach at the end, the vision with which one started.Collection: Vision
Since time immemorial and pre-industrial, 'greed' has been the accusation hurled at the rich by the concrete-bound illiterates who were unable to conceive of the source of wealth or of the motivation of those who produce it.Collection: Motivation
The basic need of the creator is independence. The reasoning mind cannot work under any form of compulsion. It cannot be curbed, sacrificed or subordinated to any consideration whatsoever. It demands total independence in function and in motive.Collection: Independence
Honor is self-esteem made visible in action.Collection: Self Esteem
Even if smog were a risk to human life, we must remember that life in nature, without technology, is wholesale death.Collection: Technology
A culture is made — or destroyed — by its articulate voices.Collection: Voice
Every coercive monopoly was created by government intervention into the economy: by special privileges, such as franchises or subsidies, which closed the entry of competitors into a given field, by legislative action.Collection: Government
People don't want to think. And the deeper they get into trouble, the less they want to think. But by some sort of instinct, they feel that they ought to and it makes them feel guilty. So they'll bless and follow anyone who gives them a justification for not thinking. Anyone who makes a virtue - a highly intellectual virtue - out of what they know to be their sin, their weakness and their guilt.Collection: Knowledge
Do not make the mistake...of thinking that a worker is a slave and that he holds his job by his employer's permission. He does not hold it by permission - but by contract, that is, by a voluntary mutual agreement. A worker can quit his job; a slave cannot.Collection: Jobs
Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life.Collection: Limits
Faith is the wors curse of mankind, as the exact antithesis and enemy of thought.Collection: Enemy
There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.Collection: Lying
Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration.Collection: Religion
Men have been taught that their first concern is to relieve the suffering of others. ... To make that the highest test of virtue is to make suffering the most important part of life. Then man must wish to see others suffer in order that he may be virtuous. Such is the nature of altruism.Collection: Men
If parasitism, favoritism, corruption, and greed for the unearned did not exist, a mixed economy would bring them into existence.Collection: Greed
The truly and deliberately evil men are a very small minority; it is the appeaser who unleashes them on mankind.Collection: War
There's nothing of any importance in life-except how well you do your work.Collection: Work
You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.Collection: Witty
In order to be in control of your life, you have to have a purpose-a productive purpose.Collection: Control Of Your Life
Compromise does not satisfy, but dissatisfies everybody; it does not lead to any general fulfillment, but to general frustration; those who try to become everything to all people end up by not being anything to anyone.Collection: Frustration
Any refusal to recognize reality, for any reason whatever, has disastrous consequences. There are no evil thoughts except one: the refusal to think. Don't ignore your own desires.... Don't sacrifice them. Examine their cause. There is a limit to how much you should have to bear.Collection: Sacrifice
And what is the state but a servant and a convenience for a large number of people, just like the electric light and the plumbing system? And wouldnt it be preposterous to claim that men must exist for their plumbing, not the plumbing for the men.Collection: Men