Quotes & anectdotes from
the wise,
the foolish,
the courageous &
the drunk

Ayn Rand Novelist

  • Gender: Female
  • Citizenship: United States
  • Born: Feb 2, 1905
  • Died: Mar 6, 1982

Ayn Rand was a Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter. She is known for her two best-selling novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and for developing a philosophical system she called Objectivism. Born and educated in Russia, Rand moved to the United States in 1926. She had a play produced on Broadway in 1935 - 1936. After two early novels that were initially unsuccessful in America, she achieved fame with her 1943 novel, The Fountainhead.

In 1957, she published her best-known work, the novel Atlas Shrugged. Afterward, she turned to non-fiction to promote her philosophy, publishing her own magazines and releasing several collections of essays until her death in 1982. Rand advocated reason as the only means of acquiring knowledge and rejected faith and religion. She supported rational and ethical egoism, and rejected altruism. In politics, she condemned the initiation of force as immoral and opposed collectivism and statism as well as anarchism, instead supporting laissez-faire capitalism, which she defined as the system based on recognizing individual rights. In art, Rand promoted romantic realism.

Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone.

Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision.

I don't build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.

When I die, I hope to go to Heaven, whatever the Hell that is.

Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values.

So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of all money?

To say 'I love you' one must first be able to say the 'I.'

Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.

The truth is not for all men, but only for those who seek it.

God... a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive.

A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.

Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice.

The ladder of success is best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity.

Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.

If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.

To achieve, you need thought. You have to know what you are doing and that's real power.

A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.

Money is the barometer of a society's virtue.

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.

Do not ever say that the desire to 'do good' by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.

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.

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.

Upper classes are a nation's past the middle class is its future.