Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand

Philosopher, Novelist

Ayn Rand was a Russian-American writer and philosopher known for her development of Objectivism and works like 'Atlas Shrugged'.

Men Mean Thinking Rights People Sacrifice
Born
February 2, 1905
Died
March 6, 1982
Quotes
1K
Rank
#119

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Ayn Rand quotes (page 12 of 53)

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Ayn Rand Philosopher, Novelist
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"I am opposed to all forms of control; I am for an absolute laissez faire, free, unregulated economy. I am for the separation of the state and economics, just as we had separation of state and church, which led to peaceful coexistence among different religions...so the same applies to economics. If you separate the government from economics, if you do not regulate production and trade, you will have peaceful cooperation, and harmony and justice among men."

Men Justice Peaceful
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"In the temple of his spirit, each man is alone."

Men Temples Spirit
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"Now take a human body. Why wouldn't you like to see a human body with a curling tail with a crest of ostrich feathers at the end? And with ears shaped like acanthus leaves? It would be ornamental, you know, instead of the stark, bare ugliness we have now. Well, why don't you like the idea? Because it would be useless and pointless. Because the beauty of the human body is that is hasn't a single muscle which doesn't serve its purpose; that there's not a line wasted; that every detail of it fits one idea, the idea of a man and the life of a man."

Men Ostriches Ideas
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"In that world, you'll be able to rise in the morning with the spirit you had known in your childhood: that spirit of eagerness, adventure and certainty which comes from dealing with a rational universe."

Morning Adventure Childhood
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"The American businessmen, as a class, have demonstrated the greatest productive genius and the most spectacular achievements ever recorded in the economic history of mankind. What reward did they receive from our culture and its intellectuals? The position of a hated, persecuted minority. The position of a scapegoat for the evils of the bureaucrats."

Business Class Evil
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"She smiled. She knew she was dying. But it did not matter any longer. She had known something which no human words could ever tell and she knew it now. She had been awaiting it and she felt it, as if it had been, as if she had lived it. Life had been, if only because she had known it could be, and she felt it now as a hymn without sound, deep under the little whole that dripped red drops into the snow, deeper than that from which the red drops came. A moment or an eternity- did it matter? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist. She smiled, her last smile, to so much that had been possible."

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

Gratitude Treasure My Thoughts
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"I say that man is entitled to his own happiness and that he must achieve it himself. But that he cannot demand that others give up their lives to make him happy."

Giving Up Men Liberty
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"An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced."

Honesty Men Novelists
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"If a drought strikes them, animals perish--man builds irrigation canals; if a flood strikes them, animals perish--man builds dams; if a carnivorous pack attacks them, animals perish--man writes the Constitution of the United States."

Writing Men Animal
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"A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race - and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin."

Race Numbers Genius
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"Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman's tool is values; the bureaucrat's tool is fear."

Mean Men Offering
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"Don't ever give up what you want in life. The struggle is worth it."

Giving Up Struggle Want
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"Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equalled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism."

Selfish Names History
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"There can be no compromise on basic principles. There can be no compromise on moral issues. There can be no compromise on matters of knowledge, of truth, of rational conviction."

Truth Integrity Knowledge
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"Man's basic vice, the source of all his evils, is the act of unfocusing his mind, the suspension of his consciousness, which is not blindness, but the refusal to see, not ignorance, but the refusal to know."

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

Artist Men Fountainhead
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"That an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error."

Mean Errors Firsts
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"Capitalism is based on individual rights - not on the sacrifice of the individual to the 'public good' of the collective."

Sacrifice Rights Individual
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"Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life."

Limits Expanding Thrive
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