Author

Ayn Rand

49 quotations

About Ayn Rand

Alice O'Connor, better known by her pen name Ayn Rand, was a Russian and American writer and philosopher. She is known for her fiction and for developing a philosophical system which she named Objectivism.

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Topics: Men Money Government Power Society Life
Just as man can't exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one's rights into reality, to think, to work and keep the results, which means: the right of property.
The ladder of success is best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity.
Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
God... a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive.

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The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossib…
To achieve, you need thought. You have to know what you are doing and that's real power.
Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice.
Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason.
Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter.
So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of all money?
Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.
Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason.
Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision.
If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.
The truth is not for all men, but only for those who seek it.
Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossib…
I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he rec…