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Ayn Rand Quotes (1905-1982)
Philosopher, Writer, Playwright
About Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand (2 February 1905 – 6 March 1982) was a Russian-born American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter. She is known for her bestselling novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and for developing a philosophical system called Objectivism.
Best Ayn Rand Quotes
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Explore our curated collection of the most famous and impactful Ayn Rand quotes.
“"I am. I think. I will."”
“All progress is the work of individuals.”
“Honor is self-esteem made visible in action.”
“A culture is made — or destroyed — by its articulate voices.”
“As far as the feminist movement is concerned, I am a male chauvinist.”
“Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.”
““Free competition enforced by law” is a grotesque contradiction in terms.”
“Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's individual value-judgments.”
“There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.”
“Errors of knowledge are not breaches of morality; no proper moral code can demand infallibility or omniscience.”
“The worst evil that you can do, psychologically, is to laugh at yourself. That means spitting in your own face.”
“Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration.”
“Even if smog were a risk to human life, we must remember that life in nature, without technology, is wholesale death.”
Ayn Rand Quotes by Topic
Find exactly what you are looking for by browsing this categorized list of Ayn Rand quotes by topic.
Ayn Rand on United States 7 quotes
“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.”
Ayn Rand on Love 6 quotes
View all 6 quotes on Love →Ayn Rand on Statism 6 quotes
“Statism needs war; a free country does not. Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by production.”
Ayn Rand on Ego 5 quotes
View all 5 quotes on Ego →Ayn Rand on Capitalism 5 quotes
“Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.”
Ayn Rand on Self-esteem 4 quotes
“Honor is self-esteem made visible in action.”
Ayn Rand on Imitation 4 quotes
“A world where the thought of each man will not be his own, but an attempt to guess the thought of his neighbor.”
Ayn Rand on Escapism 4 quotes
“And this is the whole shabby secret: to some men, the sight of an achievement is a reproach, a reminder that their own lives are irrational, and that there is no loophole - no escape from reason and reality. Their resentment is the cornered Dionysian element baring its teeth.”
Ayn Rand on Racism 3 quotes
“Today, racism is regarded as a crime if practiced by a majority—but as an inalienable right if practiced by a minority.”
Ayn Rand on Altruism 3 quotes
“The man who attempts to live for others is a dependent. He is a parasite in motive and makes parasites of those he serves.”
Ayn Rand on Money 2 quotes
“Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.”
Ayn Rand on Omniscience 2 quotes
“Errors of knowledge are not breaches of morality; no proper moral code can demand infallibility or omniscience.”
What Ayn Rand Said About Others
Discover personal opinions Ayn Rand shared regarding contemporaries.
Ayn Rand on Immanuel Kant
Ayn Rand on H. L. Mencken
“I hope you will understand my hesitation in writing to one whom I admire as the greatest representative of a philosophy to which I want to dedicate my whole life.”
Ayn Rand on Sigmund Freud
“Perhaps the last cultural fad one could still argue against was Karl Marx. But Freud — or Rawls? To argue against such persons is to grant them a premise they spend all of their effort disproving: that reason is involved in their theories.”
Ayn Rand on Karl Marx
“[W]hen Karl Marx, the most consistent translator of the altruist morality into practical action and political theory, advocated a society where all would be sacrificed to all, starting with the immediate immolation of the able, the intelligent, the successful and the wealthy—whatever opposition he did encounter, nobody opposed him on moral grounds. Predominantly, he was granted the status of a noble, but impractical, idealist.”
Ayn Rand on Adam
“That man, the unsubmissive and first, stands in the opening chapter of every legend mankind has recorded about its beginning. Prometheus was chained to a rock and torn by vultures — because he had stolen the fire of the gods. Adam was condemned to suffer — because he had eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Whatever the legend, somewhere in the shadows of its memory mankind knew that its glory began with one and that that one paid for his courage.”
Ayn Rand on B. F. Skinner
“There are occasions when a worthless, insignificant book acquires significance as a scrap of litmus paper exposing a culture's intellectual state. Such a book is Beyond Freedom and Dignity by B.F. Skinner.... The book itself is like Boris Karloff's embodiment of Frankenstein's monster: a corpse patched with nuts, bolts and screws from the junkyard of philosophy (Pragmatism, Social Darwinism, Positivism, Linguistic Analysis, with some nails by Hume, threads by Russell, and glue by the New York Post). The book's voice, like Karloff's, is an emission of inarticulate, moaning growls — directed at a special enemy: "Autonomous Man."”
Ayn Rand on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
“While scientists were performing astounding feats of disciplined reason [during the Enlightenment], breaking down the barriers of the “unknowable” in every field of knowledge, charting the course of light rays in space or the course of blood in the capillaries of man's body -- what philosophy was offering them, as interpretation of and guidance for their achievements was the plain Witchdoctory of Hegel, who proclaimed that matter does not exist at all, that everything is Idea (not somebody's idea, just Idea), and that this Idea operates by the dialectical process of a new “super-logic” which proves that contradictions are the law of reality, that A is non-A, and that omniscience about the physical universe (including electricity, gravitation, the solar system, etc.) is to be derived, not from the observation of facts, but from the contemplation of that Idea's triple somersaults inside his, Hegel's, mind. This was offered as a philosophy of reason.”
Quotes About Ayn Rand
Gain deeper perspective through quotes about Ayn Rand from others.
Peter L. Berger on Ayn Rand
“It is difficult to accord an important place to Ayn Rand either as a novelist or as a thinker. And yet there is something appealing, even a touch of grandeur, about the figure who emerges from Ms. Branden's somewhat tortured account: the young woman who arrives in America clutching her Remington Rand typewriter (she took her name from it); who not only renames herself but proceeds to remake herself in the shape of her passionately held ideals; the hero-worshiper who invented improbably heroic figures in her novels and who convinced very ordinary people that they too could be heroes; the mature and successful figure who always refused compromise, no matter what the cost, and who faced bitter personal disappointment and pain with an unbending courage. One can understand why this individual, whatever her intellectual and personal foibles, could command loyalty and inspire commitment.”
Craig Biddle on Ayn Rand
“Morality or ethics, observed [Ayn] Rand, "is a code of values to guide man's choices and actions—the choices and actions that determine the purpose and the course of his life". And the first step toward understanding a code of values, she reasoned, is to understand the nature of values.”
Barbara Branden on Ayn Rand
“Although the Objectivist movement clearly had many of the trappings of a cult - the aggrandizement of the person of Ayn Rand, the too ready acceptance of her personal opinions on a host of subjects, the incessant moralizing - it is nevertheless significant that the fundamental attraction of Objectivism... was the precise opposite of religious worship.”
Nathaniel Branden on Ayn Rand
“We were not a cult in the literal, dictionary sense of the word, but certainly there was a cultish aspect to our world.... We were a group organized around a charismatic leader, whose members judged one another's character chiefly by loyalty to that leader and to her ideas...”
David Brin on Ayn Rand
“For [Rand] further holds that objective reality is readily accessible by solitary individuals using words and logic alone. This proposition - rejected by nearly all modern scientists - is essentially a restatement of the Platonic worldview, a fundamental axiom of which is that the universe is made up of ideal essences or 'values' (the term Rand preferred) that can be discovered, dispassionately examined, and objectively analyzed by those few bold minds who are able to finally free themselves from hoary assumptions of the past. Once freed, any truly rational individual must, by simply applying verbal reasoning, independently reach the same set of fundamental conclusions about life, justice and the universe. (Naturally, any mind that fails to do so must, by definition, not yet be free.)”
William F. Buckley Jr. on on Ayn Rand
“Her novel Atlas Shrugged... a thousand pages of ideological fabulism. I had to flog myself to read it.”
Dick Cavett on Ayn Rand
“You can piss away valuable hours of your life reading Ayn Rand—her wretched appeal to the young, her wretched writing, her wretched person. She was supposed to be on my show; I was kind of sorry she wasn't, because I was kind of laying for her. I did not succumb, as a kid, to being enthused by Ayn Rand, and that sense of power, as every kid was at one time until they outgrew it. The old bag sent over a list of fifteen conditions for appearing with me, or for appearing with anyone, I guess. One of them was, “There will be no disagreeing with Ms. Rand’s philosophy.” [...] I wrote at the bottom of the list, to be sent back to her, “There will be no Ms. Rand, either.””
Whittaker Chambers on Ayn Rand
“Something of this implication is fixed in the book's dictatorial tone, which is much its most striking feature. Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal. In addition, the mind which finds this tone natural to it shares other characteristics of its type.1) It consistently mistakes raw force for strength, and the rawer the force, the more reverent the posture of the mind before it. 2) It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable) can only be willfully wicked. There are ways of dealing with such wickedness, and, in fact, right reason itself enjoins them. From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: “To a gas chamber — go!””
Stephanie Clayton on Ayn Rand
Stephen Colbert on Ayn Rand
Theodore Dalrymple on Ayn Rand
“A passionate hater of religion, Rand founded a cult around her own person, complete with rituals of excommunication; a passionate believer in rationality and logic, she was incapable of seeing the contradictions in her own work. She was a rationalist who was not entirely rational; she could not distinguish between rationalism and rationality. Of narrow aesthetic sympathies, she laid down the law in matters of artistic judgment like a panjandrum; a believer in honesty, she was adept at self-deception and special pleading. I have rarely read a biography of a writer I should have cared so little to meet.”
Paul Ryan’s Biggest Influence: 10 Things You Should Know About the Lunatic Ayn Rand, Jan Frel, on Ayn Rand
“The most devoted member of (Rand's) inner circle," George Monbiot writes, "was Alan Greenspan, former head of the US Federal Reserve. Among the essays he wrote for Rand were those published in a book he co-edited with her called Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. Here, starkly explained, you'll find the philosophy he brought into government. There is no need for the regulation of business—even builders or Big Pharma—he argued, as 'the "greed" of the businessman or, more appropriately, his profit-seeking ... is the unexcelled protector of the consumer.' As for bankers, their need to win the trust of their clients guarantees that they will act with honour and integrity. Unregulated capitalism, he maintains, is a 'superlatively moral system.'”
About Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand (2 February 1905 – 6 March 1982) was a Russian-born American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter. She is known for her bestselling novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and for developing a philosophical system called Objectivism.