Quotes from Ayn Rand

Ethics is a code of values which guide our choices and actions and determine the purpose and course of our lives.

You have been the one encounter in my life that can never be repeated

It is not death that we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to live.

There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.

I refuse to apologize for my ability -- I refuse to apologize for my success -- I refuse to apologize for my money. If this is evil, make the most of it.

Man is an end in himself.

It takes two to make a very great career: the man who is great, and the man--almost rarer--who is great enough to see greatness and say so.

Happiness is not to be achieved at the command of emotional whims.

Life is the reward of virtue. And happiness is the goal and reward of life.

Virtue is not an end in itself. Virtue is not its own reward or sacrificial fodder for the reward of evil. Life is the reward of virtue-and happiness is the goal and the reward of life.

Life is a value to be bought and thinking is the only coin noble enough to buy it.

In order to be in control of your life, you have to have a purpose-a productive purpose.

The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life.

I think it's a sin to sit down and let your life go without making a try for it.

Neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims.

Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.

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 for men to live without breaking laws.

Rights are not a matter of numbers - and there can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob.

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

To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one's thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one's mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.

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

Even if smog were a risk to human life, we must remember that life in nature, without technology, is wholesale death.

Thanksgiving is a typically American holiday...The lavish meal is a symbol of the fact that abundant consumption is the result and reward of production.

The great creators-the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors-stood alone against the men of their time.