Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand
Ayn Randwas a Russian-born American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter. She is known for her two best-selling novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and for developing a philosophical system she called Objectivism. Educated in Russia, she moved to the United States in 1926. She had a play produced on Broadway in 1935–1936. After two early novels that were initially unsuccessful in America, she achieved fame with her 1943 novel, The Fountainhead...
NationalityRussian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth2 February 1905
CitySaint Petersburg, Russia
CountryRussian Federation
The sky is like a black sieve pierced by silver drops that tremble, ready to burst through.
Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artists metaphysical value judgments.
Is it advisable to spread out all the conveniences of culture before people to whom a few steps up a stair to a library is a sufficient deterrent from reading?
Rights are not a matter of numbers - and there can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob.
Man's unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself.
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.
Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.
Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth, the man who would make his fortune no matter where he started.
There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.
Man holds these rights [life, liberty and property], not from the Collective nor for the Collective, but against the Collective - as a barrier which the Collective cannot cross... these rights are man's protection against all other men.
Altruism does not mean mere kindness or generosity, but the sacrifice of the best among men to the worst, the sacrifice of virtues to flaws, of ability to incompetence, of progress to stagnation-and the subordinating of all life and of all values to the claims of anyone's suffering.
When it is established that government by right can take wealth from some and give it to others. When a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law, men will use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they have passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket.
Self-esteem is reliance on one's power to think... The man of authentic self-confidence is the man who relies on the judgment of his own mind.
There is a fundamental moral difference between a man who sees his self-interest in production and a man who sees it in robbery. The evil of a robber does not lie in the fact that he pursues his own interests, but in what he regards as to his own interest; not in the fact that he pursues his values, but in what he chose to value; not in the fact that he wants to live, but in the fact that he wants to live on a subhuman level...