Quotes from Ayn Rand

I could die for you. But I couldn't, and wouldn't, live for you.

The action required to sustain human life is primarily intellectual: everything man needs has to be discovered by his mind and produced by his effort.

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.

Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.

You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.

Political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries.

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 freedom of speech of private individuals includes the right to not agree, not to listen, and not to finance one's own antagonists.

Believing in fate produces fate. Believing in freedom will create infinite possibilities.

I guard my treasures: my thoughts, my will, my freedom. And the greatest of these is freedom.

Freedom comes from seeing the ignorance of your critics and discovering the emptiness of their virtue.

The degree of a country's freedom is the degree of its prosperity.

It stands to reason that if sacrifices are being given, somebody is collecting sacrifices.

Freedom of association includes the freedom not to associate.

Collectivism, as an intellectual power and a moral ideal, is dead. But freedom and individualism, and their political expression, capitalism, have not yet been discovered.

The question isn't who's going to let me; it's who's going to stop me.

We are one in all and all in one. There are no men but only the great WE, One, indivisible and forever. We repeat this to ourselves, but it helps us not.

Man is a being with free will; therefore, each man is potentially good or evil, and it's up to him and only him (through his reasoning mind) to decide which he wants to be.

The difference between animals and humans is that animals change themselves for the environment, but humans change the environment for themselves.

The purpose of the law is not to prevent a future offense, but to punish the one actually committed.

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

That love is reverence, and worship, and glory, and the upward glance. Not a bandage for dirty sores. But they don't know it. Those who speak of love most promiscuously are the ones who've never felt it. They make some sort of feeble stew out of sympathy, compassion, comtempt, and general indiference, and they call it love. Once you've felt what it means to love as you and I know it - the total passion for the total height - you are unable of anything else.

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

Love is an expression and assertion of self-esteem, a response to one's own values in the person of another. One gains a profoundly personal, selfish joy from the mere existence of the person one loves. It is one's own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns, and derives from love.