120 quotes
A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.
Onlogic: Speed and Vision (2008)
Remember also that the smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966)
There are … no conflicts of interest among rational men, men who do not desire the unearned.
Errors of knowledge are not breaches of morality; no proper moral code can demand infallibility or omniscience.
The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)
Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.
Atlas Shrugged (1957)
Statism needs war; a free country does not. Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by production.
Honor is self-esteem made visible in action.
The Ayn Rand Letter (1971)
It is typical of today's culture that the proponents of seething, raging hostility are taken as advocates of love.
Apollo and Dionysus (1969)
God... a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive.
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.
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966)
The highest thing in a man is not his god. It's that in him which knows the reverence due a god. You are my highest reverence.
We The Living (1936)
As far as the feminist movement is concerned, I am a male chauvinist.
The Sanction of Victims (1981)
Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.
The moral cannibalism of all hedonist and altruist doctrines lies in the premise that the happiness of one man necessitates the injury of another.
The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)
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.
The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1999)
Nothing can ever justify so monstrously evil a theory. Nothing can justify the horror, the brutality, the plunder, the destruction, the starvation, the slave-labor camps, the torture chambers, the wholesale slaughter of statist dictatorships.
I am an intransigent atheist, though not a militant one. This means that I am not fighting against religion — I am fighting for reason.
By the same principle, the government may not give special leniency to the perpetrator of a crime, on the grounds of the nature of his ideas.
The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1971)
Competition is a by-product of productive work, not its goal. A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.
The Ayn Rand Letter (1971)
An artist reveals his naked soul in his work - and so, gentle reader, do you when you respond to it.
The Romantic Manifesto (1969)