Top 500 Ayn Rand Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

352. “Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgement and nothing can help you escape it – that no substitute can do your thinking, as no pinch-hitter can live your life.”

— Ayn Rand

353. “What is kinder – to believe the best of people and burden them with a nobility beyond their endurance – or to see them as they are, and accept it because it makes them comfortable?”

— Ayn Rand

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

— Ayn Rand

355. “There are no little people in America. There are only people, equal before the law, yearning to breathe free and wanting to achieve the best within them.”

— Ayn Rand

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

— Ayn Rand

357. “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

358. “Have you felt it too? Have you seen how your best friends love everything about you- except the things that count? And your most important is nothing to them; nothing, not even a sound they can recognize.”

— Ayn Rand

359. “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

360. “The age of the skyscraper is gone. This is the age of the housing project. Which is always a prelude to the age of the cave.”

— Ayn Rand

361. “Let us destroy, but don’t let us pretend that we are commiting an act of virtue.”

— Ayn Rand

362. “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

363. “Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.”

— Ayn Rand

364. “It is a free market that makes monopolies impossible.”

— Ayn Rand

365. “Psychologically, the choice “to think or not” is the choice “to focus or not.” Existentially, the choice “to focus or not” is the choice “to be conscious or not.” Metaphysically, the choice “to be conscious or not” is the choice of life or death.”

— Ayn Rand

366. “To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one’s thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one’s mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.”

— Ayn Rand

367. “There is only one kind of men who have never been on strike in human history. Every other kind and class have stopped, when they so wished, and have presented demands to the world, claiming to be indispensable – except the men who have carried the world on their shoulders, have kept it alive, have endured torture as sole payment, but have never walked out on the human race.”

— Ayn Rand

368. “Let no man posture as an advocate of peace if he proposes or supports any social system that initiates the use of force against individual men, in any form.”

— Ayn Rand

369. “The charming aspect of Christmas is the fact that it expresses good will in a cheerful, happy, benevolent, non-sacrificial way.”

— Ayn Rand

370. “A reader has to be concerned only with the end result; unless he chooses to analyze it, he does not have to know by what means that result was achieved-but it is my job to know.”

— Ayn Rand

371. “A good novel is an indivisible sum; every scene, sequence and passage of a good novel has to involve, contribute to and advance all three of its major attributes: theme, plot, characterization.”

— Ayn Rand

372. “I don’t want to see you. I don’t like you. I don’t like your face. You look like an insufferable egotist. You’re impertinent. You’re too sure of yourself. Twenty years ago I would have punched your face with the greatest of pleasure.”

— Ayn Rand

373. “Love, friendship, respect, admiration are the emotional response of one man to the virtues of another, the spiritual payment given in exchange for the personal, selfish pleasure which one man derives from the virtues of another man’s character.”

— Ayn Rand

374. “We are all brothers under the skin – and I, for one, would be willing to skin humanity to prove it.”

— Ayn Rand

375. “Patience is always rewarded and romance is always round the corner!”

— Ayn Rand

376. “Talent alone is helpless today. Any success requires both talent and luck. And the ‘luck’ has to be helped along and provided by someone.”

— Ayn Rand

377. “I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York’s skyline.”

— Ayn Rand

378. “It is not advisable to venture unsolicited opinions. You should spare yourself the embarrassing discovery of their exact value to your listener.”

— Ayn Rand

379. “A culture is made – or destroyed – by its articulate voices.”

— Ayn Rand

380. “Self respect is something that can’t be killed. The worst thing is to kill a man’s pretense at it.”

— Ayn Rand

381. “Romantic art is the fuel and the spark plug of a Man’s soul. It’s task is to set a soul on fire and never let it go out.”

— Ayn Rand

382. “Science was born as a result and consequence of philosophy; it cannot survive without a philosophical base. If philosophy perishes, science will be next to go.”

— Ayn Rand

383. “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.”

— Ayn Rand

384. “Thinking men cannot be ruled; ambitious men do not stagnate.”

— Ayn Rand

385. “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

386. “She knew that even pain can be confessed, but to confess happiness is to stand naked, delivered to the witness...”

— Ayn Rand

387. “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

388. “I do not seek the good of others as a sanction for my right to exist, nor do I recognize the good of others as a justification for their seizure of my property or their destruction of my life.”

— Ayn Rand

389. “It’s such a waste to be subtle and vicious with people who don’t even know that you’re being subtle and vicious.”

— Ayn Rand

390. “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

391. “If one doesn’t respect oneself one can have neither love nor respect for others.”

— Ayn Rand

392. “Without property rights, no other rights are possible.”

— Ayn Rand

393. “I refuse to accept as guilt the fact of my own existence.”

— Ayn Rand

394. “A leash is a rope with a noose at both ends.”

— Ayn Rand

395. “Unjust laws have to be fought ideologically; they cannot be fought or corrected by means of mere disobedience and futile martyrdom.”

— Ayn Rand

396. “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.”

— Ayn Rand

397. “When a man attempts to deal with me by force, I answer him, by force.”

— Ayn Rand

398. “The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world.”

— Ayn Rand

399. “For the first time since her return, she felt pain, a violent pain, but it made her feel alive, because it was worth feeling.”

— Ayn Rand

400. “Another current catch-phrase is the complaint that the nations of the world are divided into ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots.’ Observe that the ‘haves’ are those who have freedom, and that it is freedom that the ‘have-nots’ have not.”

— Ayn Rand