Ayn Rand quotes

“Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins.”

— Ayn Rand

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

— 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

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

— Ayn Rand

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

— Ayn Rand

“I don't build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.”

— Ayn Rand

“Evil requires the sanction of the victim.”

— Ayn Rand

“The worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt.”

— Ayn Rand

“The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap.”

— Ayn Rand

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

— Ayn Rand

“Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision.”

— Ayn Rand

“A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.”

— Ayn Rand

“Every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics - a rational ethics - as a precondition of rebirth.”

— 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

“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

“When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is learning to understand and control the behavior of crop plants and domestic animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized.”

— Ayn Rand

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

— Ayn Rand

“A desire presupposes the possibility of action to achieve it; action presupposes a goal which is worth achieving.”

— 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

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

— Ayn Rand

“Money is the barometer of a society's virtue.”

— 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

“Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.”

— Ayn Rand

“Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth, the man who would make his fortune no matter where he started.”

— Ayn Rand