 Don't pass judgement (about private conduct) unless you know something is improper, and so don't wish to deal with the person. If you are not personally involved, don't pass judgement.
Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Answers, p. 138.
“If I ask people whether they believe in life, they never understand what I mean. It's a bad question. It can mean so much that it really means nothing. So I ask them if they believe in God. And if they say they do, then I know they don't believe in life. Why? God — whatever anyone chooses to call God — is one's highest conception of the highest possible. And whoever places his highest conception above his own possibility thinks very little of himself and his life. 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
We the Living
Faith in the supernatural begins as faith in the superiority of others.
Ayn Rand
GS, FNI, 200 – ARL p 158
Faith and force . . . are corollaries: every period of history dominated by mysticism, was a period of statism, of dictatorship, of tyranny.
Ayn Rand
“Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World,” PWNI, 80 – ARL p 158
That something happened to you is of no importance to anyone, not even to you. The important thing about you is what you choose to make happen - your values and choices. That which happened by accident - what family you were born into, in what country, and where you went to school - is totally unimportant.
Ayn Rand
Playboy: Has no religion, in your estimation, ever offered anything of constructive value to human life? Rand: Qua religion, no — in the sense of blind belief, belief unsupported by, or contrary to, the facts of reality and the conclusion of reason. Faith, as such, is extremely detrimental to human life: it is the negation of reason. But you must remember that religion is an early form of philosophy, that the first attempts to explain the universe, to give a coherent frame of reference to man’s life and code of moral values, were made by religion, before man graduated or developed enough to have philosophy. And, as philosophies, some religions have very valuable moral points. They may have a good influence or proper principles to inculcate, but in a very contradictory context and, on a very—how shall I say it?—dangerous or malevolent base: on the ground of faith.
Ayn Rand
“Playboy’s Interview with Ayn Rand,” – ARL p 411
"My personal life," says Ayn Rand, "is a postscript to my novels: it consists of the sentence, 'And I mean it.' I have always lived by the philosophy I present in my books--and it works for me, as it works for my characters. The concretes differ, the abstractions are the same." ... "I trust that no one will tell me that men such as I wrote about don't exist. That this book has been written--and published--is proof that they do."
Ayn Rand
"About the Author," at the end of Atlas Shrugged
"A dogma is a set of beliefs accepted on faith; that is, without rational justification or against rational evidence. A dogma is a matter of blind faith."
Ayn Rand
I don't build in order to have [profits]. I have [profits] in order to build.
Ayn Rand
A bastardization of a favourite Roark quote used to settle the question of whether profits are an end in themselves. They are not.
"[Regard] language as a tool of honor, always to be used as if one were under oath--an oath of allegiance to reality."
Ayn Rand
Atlas Shrugged
When Barbara Branden was asked by a student"What will happen to the poor in an Objectivist society?" she answered "If you want to help them, you will not be stopped."
Ayn Rand
The Virtue of Selfishness
Man rises above the perceptual level by integrating his percepts into concepts, his concepts into principles, his principles into sciences, and all of his sciences into a philosophy.
Ayn Rand
(The Art of Non-Fiction, p.27)
Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplacable spark. In the hopeless swamps of the not quite, the not yet, and the not at all, do not let the hero in your soul perish and leave only frustration for the life you deserved, but never have been able to reach. The world you desire can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.
Ayn Rand
My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.
Ayn Rand
I deal with the life-givers, not with the cannibals.
Ayn Rand
Atlas Shrugged
I told you where your course would take you. It has. ... I'm not going to help you pretend -- by arguing with you -- that the reality you're talking about is not what it is, that there's still a way to make it work and to save your neck. There isn't. ... I didn't come here to argue.
Ayn Rand
Atlas Shrugged
Ethics is not a mystic fantasy — nor a social convention — nor a dispensable, subjective luxury.... Ethics is an objective, metaphysical necessity of man’s survival — not by the grace of the supernatural nor of your neighbors nor of your whims, but by the grace of reality and the nature of life.
Ayn Rand
'The Objectivist Ethics': The Virtue of Selfishness
Kant originated the technique to sell irrational notions to the men of a skeptical, cynical age who have formally rejected mysticism without grasping the rudiments of rationality. The technique is as follows: if you want to propagate an outrageously evil idea (based on traditionally accepted doctrines), your conclusions must be brazenly clear, but your proof unintelligible. Your proof must be so tangled a mess that it will paralyze a reader’s critical faculty – a mess of evasions, equivocations, obfuscations, circumlocutions, non sequiturs, endless sentences leading nowhere, irrelevant side issues, clauses, sub-clauses and sub-sub-clauses, a meticulously lengthy proving of the obvious, and big chunks of the arbitrary thrown in as self-evident, erudite references to sciences, to pseudo sciences, to the never to be sciences, to the untraceable and the unprovable – all of it resting on a zero: the absence of definitions.
Ayn Rand
A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.
Ayn Rand
A disagreement that does not challenge fundamentals serves only to reinforce them.
Ayn Rand
"The Establishing of an Establishment", Philosophy: Who Needs It
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 receives from the virtues of another.
Ayn Rand
Denouncing masculine oppression, Women's Lib screams protests against the policy of regarding women as "sex objects"—through speakers who, too obviously, are in no such danger.
Ayn Rand
The second-hander acts, but the source of his actions is scattered in every other living person. It’s everywhere and nowhere and you can’t reason with him. He’s not open to reason. You can’t speak to him—he can’t hear. You’re tried by an empty bench.
Ayn Rand
The Fountainhead
Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplacable spark. In the hopeless swamps of the not quite, the not yet, and the not at all, do not let the hero in your soul perish and leave only frustration for the life you deserved, but never have been able to reach. The world you desire can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.
Ayn Rand
Atlas Shrugged
I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
Ayn Rand
Atlas Shrugged
There is a level of cowardice lower than that of a conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.
Ayn Rand
Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think.
Ayn Rand
http://www.InvestorWords.com Quote of the Day November 29, 2004
According to the dominant voices of her press, America, too, has a vanguard of young rebels, dissenters and fighters for freedom. Marching down the aisle of a theater, they shout their protest to the world: "I cannot travel without a passport!... I am not allowed to smoke marijuana!... I am not allowed to take my clothes off!"
Ayn Rand
The "Inexplicable Personal Alchemy"
The essense of capitalism's foreign policy is free trade--i.e., the abolition of trade barriers, of protective tariffs, of special privileges--the opening of the world's trade routes to free international exchange and competition among the private citizens of all countries dealing directly with one another. During the nineteenth century, it was free trade that liberated the world, undercutting and wrecking the remnants of feudalism and the statist tyranny of absolute monarchies.
Ayn Rand
"The Roots of War", Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
Kant's system is the biggest and most intricate booby trap in the history of philosophy - but it's so full of holes that once you grasp its gimmick, you can defuse it without any trouble and walk forward over it in perfect safety. And once it is defused, the lesser Kantians ... will fall of their own weightlessness, by chain reaction.
Ayn Rand
'Philosophy: Who Needs It' (Address at West Point Military Academy, 1974)
I resent the modern method of never defining ideas, and lumping totally different people into a collective by means of smears and derogatory terms.
Ayn Rand
Interview with Playboy
Observe the false dichotomy offered; man's choice is either mindless, "instinctual" copulation - or marriage, an institution presented not as a union of passionate love, but as a relationship of "chaste intimacy", of "special personal friendship", of "discipline proper to purity", of unselfish duty, of alternating bouts with frustration and pregnancy, and of such unspeakable, Grade-B-movie-folks-next-door kind of boredom that any semi-living man would have to run, in self-preservation, to the nearest whorehouse.
Ayn Rand
On Living Death, a speech discussing the 1968 papal encyclical Humanae Vitae.
To deal with men by force is as impractical as to deal with nature by persuasion.
Ayn Rand
"The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made", PWNI
I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.
Ayn Rand
The Fountainhead
What would I do with his money if I have to give up my mind in order to get it?
Ayn Rand
Refusing the offer of millions of dollars from an oilman to introduce a religious element to Objectivism.
"Thinking men cannot be ruled."
Ayn Rand
America's abundance was not created by public sacrifices to the common good, but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes.
Ayn Rand
It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there's someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.
Ayn Rand
The government was set to protect man from criminals – and the Constitution was written to protect man from the government.
Ayn Rand
There's no way to rule innocent 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 impossible to live without breaking laws.
Ayn Rand
A crime is the violation of the right(s) of other men by force (or fraud). It is only the initiation of physical force against others- i.e., the recourse to violence- that can be classified as a crime in a free society (as distinguished from a civil wrong). Ideas, in a free society, are not a crime- and neither can they serve as the justification of a crime.
Ayn Rand
We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.
Ayn Rand
The Nature of Government
It makes no difference whether government controls allegedly favor the interests of labor or business, of the poor or the rich, of a special class or a special race: the results are the same. The notion that a dictatorship can benefit any one social group at the expense of others is a worn remnant of the Marxist mythology of class warfare, refuted by half a century of factual evidence. All men are victims and losers under a dictatorship; nobody wins-except the ruling clique.
Ayn Rand
A moral revolution is the most difficult, the most demanding, the most radical form of rebellion, but that is the task to be done, if you choose to accept it…. Civilization does not have to perish. The brutes are winning only by default.
Ayn Rand
Philosophy: Who Needs It
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