Quotes from Ayn Rand

Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind, and a step that travels unlimited roads.

Man's unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself.

Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason.

Great men can't be ruled.

It is the basic, metaphysical fact of man's nature -- the connection between his survival and his use of reason -- that capitalism recognizes and protects.

There is nothing to take a man's freedom away from him, save other men.

When personal judgment is inoperative (or forbidden), men's first concern is not how to choose, but how to justify their choice

Man's mind is his basic tool of survival.

Since reason is man's basic means of survival, that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; that which negates, opposes or destroys it is the evil.

Men have been taught that it is a virtue to stand together. But the creator is the man who stands alone.

Each man must live as an end in himself and follow his own rational self-interest.

The only man never to be redeemed is the man without passion.

Man's character is the product of his premises.

But what man does out of despair, is not necessarily a key to his character. I have always thought that the real key is in that which he seeks for his enjoyment.

Have you noticed that the imbecile always smiles? Man's first frown is the first touch of God on his forehead. The touch of thought.

Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth, the man who would make his fortune no matter where he started.

To preserve one's mind intact through a modern college education is a test of courage and endurance, but the battle is worth it and the stakes are the highest possible to man: the survival of reason.

The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence.

Reality confronts man with a great many musts, but all of them are conditional the formula of realistic necessity is You must, if and the if stands for man's choice

It is morally obscene to regard wealth as an anonymous, tribal product and to talk about 'redistributing' it.

There's nothing of any importance in life-except how well you do your work.

You know what you are actually in love with? Integrity. The impossible. The clean, consistent, reasonable, self-faithful, the all-of-one-style, like a work of art.

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.

If some men are entitled by right to the products of the work of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labor.