Quotes by Ayn Rand

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

When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is learning to understand and control the behavior of crop plants and domestic animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized.

The ladder of success is best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity.

We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.

The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there arent 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.

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

Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice.

God... a being whose only definition is that he is beyond mans power to conceive.

The truth is not for all men, but only for those who seek it.

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

Potentially, a government is the most dangerous threat to mans rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.

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

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

Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the lepers bell of an approaching looter.

Money is the barometer of a societys virtue.

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

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savages whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

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

Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone.

Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.