Ayn Rand Archives - Subconscious Quotes

Ayn Rand

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

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

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

Every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics - a rational ethics - as a precondition of rebirth.

The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see.

I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Evil requires the sanction of the victim.

The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap.

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

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.

A desire presupposes the possibility of action to achieve it; action presupposes a goal which is worth achieving.

Money is the barometer of a society's virtue.

Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins.

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.

Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).

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