Top 500 Ayn Rand Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “I am opposed to all forms of control. I am for an absolute, laissez-faire, free, unregulated economy.”

— Ayn Rand

452. “Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked: ‘Account Overdrawn.’”

— Ayn Rand

453. “It is a sin to write this.”

— Ayn Rand

454. “That’s a cute sentence: the years to come. Why are you so sure they’re coming?”

— Ayn Rand

455. “The question of whether one alleges the Superiority or Inferiority of any given race is irrelevant; racism has only one psychological root: the racist’s sense of his own Inferiority.”

— Ayn Rand

456. “Ask anything of men. Ask them to achieve wealth, fame, love, brutality, murder, self-sacrifice. But don’t ask them to achieve self-respect. They will hate your soul.”

— Ayn Rand

457. “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade...”

— Ayn Rand

458. “Within the extent of your knowledge, you are right.”

— Ayn Rand

459. “Guilt is a rope that wears thin.”

— Ayn Rand

460. “The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word ‘selfishness’ is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual ‘package-deal,’ which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind.”

— Ayn Rand

461. “He liked to observe emotions; they were like red lanterns strung along the dark unknown of another’s personality, marking vulnerable points.”

— Ayn Rand

462. “Allies never trust each other, but that doesn’t spoil their effectiveness.”

— Ayn Rand

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

— Ayn Rand

464. “Kill reverence and you’ve killed the hero in man.”

— Ayn Rand

465. “But Aristotle’s philosophy was the intellect’s Declaration of Independence.”

— Ayn Rand

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

— Ayn Rand

467. “I do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and I do not live in chronic dread of disaster. It is no happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that I regard as the abnormal exception in Human Life.”

— Ayn Rand

468. “The purpose of the law is not to prevent a future offense, but to punish the one actually committed.”

— Ayn Rand

469. “The action required to sustain human life is primarily intellectual; everything man needs has to be discovered by his mind and produced by his effort.”

— Ayn Rand

470. “I am not morally obligated to care more for a man than he cares for himself.”

— Ayn Rand

471. “Dagny, we can never lose the things we live for. We may have to change their form at times, if we’ve made an error, but the purpose remains the same and the forms are ours to make.”

— Ayn Rand

472. “He walked, groping for a sentence that hung in his mind as an empty shape. He could neither fill it or dismiss it.”

— Ayn Rand

473. “What is my joy if all hands, even the unclean, can reach into it? What is my wisdom, if even the fools can dictate to me? What is my freedom, if all creatures, even the botched and the impotent, are my masters? What is my life, if I am but to bow, to agree and to obey?”

— Ayn Rand

474. “I’m not asking you to do your best. I’m asking you to do your job.” -Dagny Taggart.”

— Ayn Rand

475. “Compromise now, because you’ll have to later, anyway, only then you’ll have gone through things you’ll wish you hadn’t.”

— Ayn Rand

476. “What is man? He’s just a collection of chemicals with delusions of grandeur.”

— Ayn Rand

477. “The sky is like a black sieve pierced by silver drops that tremble, ready to burst through.”

— Ayn Rand

478. “To love is to value. Only a rationally selfish man, a man of self esteem, is capable of love – because he is the only man capable of holding firm, consistent, uncompromising, unbetrayed value. The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone.”

— Ayn Rand

479. “I love you, Dominique. As selfishly as the fact that I exist. As selfishly as my lungs breathe air. I breathe for my own necessity, for the fuel of my body, for my survival. I’ve given you, not my sacrifice or my pity, but my ego and my naked need. This is the only way I can want you to love me.”

— Ayn Rand

480. “There is fear hanging in the air of the sleeping halls, and the air of the streets. Fear walks through the city, fear without name, without shape. All men feel it and none dare speak.”

— Ayn Rand

481. “I can’t compete and when I do, the rules of engagement change in the middle of the game. I’ll let the powers that be vanquish themselves and return in three to five years to sift through the remains.”

— Ayn Rand

482. “We have followed you,” they said, “and we shall follow you wherever you go. If danger threatens you, we shall face it also. If it be death, we shall die with you. You are damned, and we wish to share your damnation.”

— Ayn Rand

483. “Im waiting, for what, my kind of people, what kind is that, i can tell my kind of people by their faces, by something in their faces.”

— Ayn Rand

484. “I’m not capable of suffering completely. I never have. It goes only down to a certain point and then it stops. As long as there is that untouched point, it’s not really pain.”

— Ayn Rand

485. “If parasitism, favoritism, corruption, and greed for the unearned did not exist, a mixed economy would bring them into existence.”

— Ayn Rand

486. “Their eyes were dark and hard and glowing, with no fear in them, no kindness and no guilt.”

— Ayn Rand

487. “The entire history of science is a progression of exploded fallacies.”

— Ayn Rand

488. “Some day, the world will discover that, without thought, there can be no love.”

— Ayn Rand

489. “The doctrine that ‘human rights’ are superior to ‘property rights’ simply means that some human beings have the right to make property out of others.”

— Ayn Rand

490. “We are nothing. Mankind is all. By the grace of our brothers are we allowed our lives. We exist through, by and for our brothers who are the State. Amen.”

— Ayn Rand

491. “Kira, the highest thing in man is not his god. It’s that in him which knows the reverence due a god. And you, Kira, are my highest reverence...”

— Ayn Rand

492. “She knew that she could not have reached this white serenity except as the sum of all the colors, of all the violence she had known.”

— Ayn Rand

493. “When a man feels fear without reason, you call him to the attention of a psychiatrist; you are not so careful to protect the meaning, the nature and the dignity of love.”

— Ayn Rand

494. “Doctors are not servants of their patients, they are traders like everyone else in a free society and they should bear that title proudly considering the crucial importance of the services they offer.”

— Ayn Rand

495. “There is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone.”

— Ayn Rand

496. “There’s only one passion in most artists more violent than their desire for admiration: their fear of identifying the nature of such admiration as they do receive.”

— Ayn Rand

497. “It meant nothing to him any longer, only a faint tinge of sadness – and somewhere within him, a drop of pain moving briefly and vanishing, like a raindrop on the glass of a window, its course in the shape of a question mark.”

— Ayn Rand

498. “We didn’t really have to take everything so seriously, did we?”

— Ayn Rand

499. “I want to know that I’ve accomplished something. I want to feel that it had some meaning. At the last summing up, I want to be sure it wasn’t all-for nothing.”

— Ayn Rand

500. “When I die I hope to go to heaven – whatever that is – and I want to be able to afford the price of admission.”

— Ayn Rand