Ayn Rand Quotes
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501. “The virtue involved in helping those one loves is not ‘selflessness’ or ‘sacrifice,’ but integrity.”

— Ayn Rand

502. “You will follow me, if we are what we are, you and I, if we live, if the world exists, if you know the meaning of this moment and can’t let it slip by, as others let it slip, into the senselessness of the unwilled and unreached.”

— Ayn Rand

503. “Have you noticed that the imbecile always smiles? Man’s first frown is the first touch of God on his forehead. The touch of thought.”

— Ayn Rand

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

504. “A ‘mixed economy’ is a society in the process of committing suicide.”

— Ayn Rand

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

— Ayn Rand

506. “If you want to feel good, be rational.”

— Ayn Rand

507. “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.”

— Ayn Rand

508. “Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?”

— Ayn Rand

509. “It’s not a question of who will allow me to do it, it’s a question of who will stop me.”

— Ayn Rand

510. “Freedom comes from seeing the ignorance of your critics and discovering the emptiness of their virtue.”

— Ayn Rand

511. “All work is an act of philosophy.”

— Ayn Rand

512. “The fortune my spirit is not to be blown into coins of brass and flung to the winds as alms for the poor of the spirit. I guard my treasures: my thought, my will, my freedom. And the greatest of these is freedom.”

— Ayn Rand

513. “The fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.”

— Ayn Rand

514. “I say that man is entitled to his own happiness and that he must achieve it himself. But that he cannot demand that others give up their lives to make him happy.”

— Ayn Rand

515. “I don’t wish to be the symbol of anything. I’m only myself.”

— Ayn Rand

516. “There is nothing wrong in helping other people, if and when they are worthy of the help and you can afford to help them.”

— Ayn Rand

517. “Integrity is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your consciousness, just as honesty is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake existence.”

— Ayn Rand

518. “It is my eyes which see, and the sight of my eyes grants beauty to the earth.”

— Ayn Rand

519. “Faith is the commitment of one’s consciousness to beliefs for which one has no sensory evidence or rational proof. A mystic is a man who treats his feelings as tools of cognition. Faith is the equation of feeling with knowledge.”

— Ayn Rand

520. “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

521. “To preserve one’s mind intact through a modern college education is a test of courage and endurance, but the battle is worth it and the stakes are the highest possible to man: the survival of reason.”

— Ayn Rand

522. “Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed.”

— Ayn Rand

523. “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

524. “I am an intransigent atheist, though not a militant one. This means that I am not fighting against religion – I am fighting for reason.”

— Ayn Rand

525. “I saw that evil was impotent – that evil was the irrational, the blind, the anti-real – and that the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it.”

— Ayn Rand

Featured in: Real Quotes

526. “Identify the dominant philosophy of a society and you can predict its future.”

— Ayn Rand

527. “But why should you care what people will say? All you have to do is please yourself.”

— Ayn Rand

528. “Even if smog were a risk to human life, we must remember that life in nature, without technology, is wholesale death.”

— Ayn Rand

529. “If you agree with some tenets of Objectivism, but disagree with others, do not call yourself an Objectivist; give proper authorship credit for the parts you agree with.”

— Ayn Rand

530. “The attack on “selfishness” is an attack on man’s self-esteem; to surrender one, is to surrender the other.”

— Ayn Rand

531. “It’s a rare gift, you know, to feel reverence for your own life and to want the best, the greatest, the highest possible, here, now, for your very own.”

— Ayn Rand

532. “I think it’s a sin to sit down and let your life go without making a try for it.”

— Ayn Rand

533. “Independence is the only gauge of human virtue and value. What a man is and makes of himself; not what he has or hasn’t done for others. There is no substitute for personal dignity.”

— Ayn Rand

534. “An artist reveals his naked soul in his work.”

— Ayn Rand

535. “The cult of moral grayness is a revolt against moral values.”

— Ayn Rand

536. “There are only two means by which men can deal with one another: guns or logic. Force or persuasion. Those who know that they cannot win by means of logic, have always resorted to guns.”

— Ayn Rand

537. “What I am fighting is the idea that charity is a moral duty and a primary virtue.”

— Ayn Rand

538. “Collectivism answers: The power of society is unlimited. Society may make any laws it wishes, and force them upon anyone in any manner it wishes.”

— Ayn Rand

539. “Thousands of years ago the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burnt at the stake he’d taught his brothers to light, but he left them a gift they had not conceived and he lifted darkness from the face of the Earth.”

— Ayn Rand

540. “Individualism regards man-every man-as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being.”

— Ayn Rand

541. “There’s nothing as significant as a human face. Nor as eloquent. We can never really know another person, except by our first glance at him. Because, in that glance, we know everything. Even though we’re not always wise enough to unravel the knowledge.”

— Ayn Rand

542. “Aristotle may be regarded as the cultural barometer of Western history. Whenever his influence dominated the scene, it paved the way for one of history’s brilliant eras; whenever it fell, so did mankind.”

— Ayn Rand

543. “We are now moving towards complete collectivism or socialism, a system under which everybody is enslaved to everybody.”

— Ayn Rand

544. “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.”

— Ayn Rand

545. “I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows.”

— Ayn Rand

546. “To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. That is freedom. This and nothing else.”

— Ayn Rand

547. “You can’t have your cake and let your neighbour eat it too.”

— Ayn Rand

548. “Why no. I’m too conceited. If you want to call it that. I don’t make comparisons. I never think of myself in relation to anyone else. I just refuse to measure myself as part of anything. I’m an utter egotist.”

— Ayn Rand

549. “If some men are entitled by right to the products of the work of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labor.”

— Ayn Rand

550. “Capitalism is our only moral system. All other systems take advantage of man’s rights and liberties.”

— Ayn Rand