Top 500 Ayn Rand Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “John Galt is Prometheus who changed his mind. After centuries of being torn by vultures in payment for having brought to men the fire of the gods, he broke his chains – and he withdrew his fire – until the day when men withdraw their vultures.”

— Ayn Rand

152. “Great men can’t be ruled.”

— Ayn Rand

153. “Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice.”

— Ayn Rand

154. “America’s founding Ideal was the principle of individual rights. Nothing more – and nothing less.”

— Ayn Rand

155. “I am not the means to any end others may wish to accomplish. I am not a tool for their use. I am not a servant of their needs. I am not a bandage for their wounds, I am not a sacrifice on their altars.”

— Ayn Rand

156. “Every loneliness is a pinnacle.”

— Ayn Rand

157. “Evil requires the sanction of the victim.”

— Ayn Rand

158. “Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.”

— Ayn Rand

159. “The code of competence is the only system of morality that’s on a gold standard.”

— Ayn Rand

160. “To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That’s what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul – would you understand why that’s much harder?”

— Ayn Rand

161. “Honor is self-esteem made visible in action.”

— Ayn Rand

162. “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.”

— Ayn Rand

163. “Live a life as a monument to your soul.”

— Ayn Rand

164. “Do not keep silent when your own ideas and values are being attacked. If a dictatorship ever comes to this country, it will be by the fault of those who keep silent. We are still free enough to speak. Do we have time? No one can tell.”

— Ayn Rand

165. “Get the hell out of my way!”

— Ayn Rand

166. “All life is a purposeful struggle, and your only choice is the choice of a goal.”

— Ayn Rand

167. “I worship individuals for their highest possibilities as individuals and I loathe humanity for its failure to live up to these possibilities.”

— Ayn Rand

168. “Show me your achievement, and the knowledge will give me courage for mine.”

— Ayn Rand

169. “There is no such thing as a lousy job – only lousy men who don’t care to do it.”

— Ayn Rand

170. “There are no evil thoughts except one; the refusal to think.”

— Ayn Rand

171. “Why do they always teach us that it’s easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It’s the hardest thing in the world – to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want.”

— Ayn Rand

172. “The great creators-the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors-stood alone against the men of their time.”

— Ayn Rand

173. “Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.”

— Ayn Rand

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

— Ayn Rand

175. “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

176. “Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.”

— Ayn Rand

177. “Emotions are inherent in your nature, but their content is dictated by your mind. Your emotional capacity is an empty motor, and your values are the fuel with which your mind fills it.”

— Ayn Rand

178. “A man of independent judgment is a man of profound self-esteem.”

— Ayn Rand

179. “The essential characteristic of socialism is the denial of individual property rights...”

— Ayn Rand

180. “Man’s mind is his basic tool of survival.”

— Ayn Rand

181. “Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man’s values, it has to be earned.”

— Ayn Rand

182. “And man will go on. Man, not men.”

— Ayn Rand

183. “Never ask people. Not about your work. Don’t you know what you want? How can you stand it, not to know?”

— Ayn Rand

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

— Ayn Rand

185. “Capitalism has been called nationalistic – yet it is the only system that banished ethnicity, and made it possible, in the United States, for men of various, formerly antagonistic nationalities to live together in peace.”

— Ayn Rand

186. “Collectivism, as an intellectual power and a moral ideal, is dead. But freedom and individualism, and their political expression, capitalism, have not yet been discovered.”

— Ayn Rand

187. “Only a man of integrity can possess the virtue of honesty, since only the faking of one’s consciousness can permit the faking of existence.”

— Ayn Rand

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

— Ayn Rand

189. “But what is freedom? Freedom from what? There is nothing to take a man’s freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. That is freedom. That and nothing else.”

— Ayn Rand

190. “The quickest way to kill the human spirit is to ask someone to do mediocre work.”

— Ayn Rand

191. “The Argument from Intimidation is a confession of intellectual impotence.”

— Ayn Rand

192. “In a capitalist society, all human relationships are voluntary. Men are free to cooperate or not, to deal with one another or not, as their own individual judgments, convictions and interests dictate.”

— Ayn Rand

193. “There can be no compromise on basic principles. There can be no compromise on moral issues. There can be no compromise on matters of knowledge, of truth, of rational conviction.”

— Ayn Rand

194. “Face a challenge and find joy in the capacity to meet it.”

— Ayn Rand

195. “Devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality; there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.”

— Ayn Rand

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

— Ayn Rand

197. “What objectivity and the study of philosophy requires is not an ‘open mind,’ but an active mind – a mind able and eagerly willing to examine ideas, but to examine them criticially.”

— Ayn Rand

198. “You must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the secondary consequences.”

— Ayn Rand

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

— Ayn Rand

200. “I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of my life.”

— Ayn Rand