“Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.”
— Ayn Rand Primary source“Who will let you? That’s not the point. The point is, who will stop me?”
— Ayn Rand Primary source“I don’t intend to build in order to have clients. I intend to have clients in order to build.”
— Ayn Rand Primary source“A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.”
— Ayn Rand Primary source“If you know that this life is all that you have, wouldn’t you make the most of it?”
— Ayn Rand Disputed“Inflation is not caused by the actions of private citizens, but by the government: by an artificial expansion of the money supply required to support deficit spending. No private embezzlers or bank robbers in history have ever plundered people’s savings on a scale comparable to the plunder perpetrated by the fiscal policies of statist governments.”
— Ayn Rand Primary source“Devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality; there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.”
— Ayn Rand Primary source“Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage—the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.”
— Ayn Rand Primary source“Have you felt it, too? Have you seen how your best friends love everything about you—except the things that count? And your most important is nothing to them, nothing, not even a sound they can recognize.”
— Ayn Rand Primary source“One loses everything when one loses one’s sense of humor.”
— Ayn Rand Primary source“Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think.”
— Ayn Rand Primary source“Everyone has the right to make his own decisions, but none has the right to force his decision on others.”
— Ayn Rand Disputed“Don’t ever get angry at a man for stating the truth.”
— Ayn Rand Primary source“You can ignore reality, but you can’t ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.”
— Ayn Rand Disputed“The thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn.”
— Ayn Rand Primary source“People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked.”
— Ayn Rand Primary source“The end does not justify the means. No one’s rights can be secured by the violation of the rights of others.”
— Ayn Rand Primary source“Why is it immoral for you to desire, but moral for others to do so? Why is it immoral to produce a value and keep it, but moral to give it away? And if it is not moral for you to keep a value, why is it moral for others to accept it? If you are selfless and virtuous when you give it, are they not selfish and vicious when they take it?”
— Ayn Rand Primary sourceWilliam Blake Eleanor Roosevelt Benjamin Franklin T. E. Lawrence A.P. Møller