Ayn Rand was a Russian-American writer and philosopher. She is known for her two best-selling novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and for developing a philosophical system she named Objectivism. Educated in Russia, she moved to the United States in 1926. She had a play produced on Broadway in 1935 and 1936. This Ayn Rand quotes about love, money, freedom will motivate you.
Best Ayn Rand Quotes
- “There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism – by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide.” ~ Ayn Rand
- “A businessman cannot force you to buy his product; if he makes a mistake, he suffers the consequences; if he fails, he takes the loss. If bureaucrat makes a mistake, you suffer the consequences; if he fails, he passes the loss on to you.” ~ Ayn Rand
- “When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion – when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing – when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors – when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you – when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice – you may know that your society is doomed.” ~ Ayn Rand
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“We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality” ~ Ayn Rand
- “If you surrender everything to the government and give it total power to plan the whole economy, this will not guarantee your economic security, but it will guarantee the descent of the entire nation to a level of miserable poverty–as the practical results of every totalitarian economy, communist or fascist, have demonstrated.” ~ Ayn Rand Quotes
- “Socialism is the doctrine that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that his life and his work do not belong to him, but belong to society, that the only justification of his existence is his service to society, and that society may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good.” ~ Ayn Rand
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“The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.” ~ Ayn Rand
- “There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for me to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed or enforced nor objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt.” ~ Ayn Rand
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“The ladder of success is best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity.” ~ Ayn Rand
- “Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force. the man had no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle. He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons, and to make weapons – a process of thought. From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and we have comes from a single attribute of man -the function of his reasoning mind.” ~ Ayn Rand
- “The government was set to protect man from criminals, and the Constitution was written to protect man from the government.” ~ Ayn Rand
- “People create their own questions because they are afraid to look straight. All you have to do is look straight and see the road, and when you see it, don’t sit looking at it – walk.” ~ Ayn Rand
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“Don’t ever give up what you want in life. The struggle is worth it.” ~ Ayn Rand
- “Two world wars, three monstrous dictatorships-in Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, Red China-plus every lesser variant of devastating socialist experimentation in a global spread of brutality and despair, have not prompted modern intellectuals to question or revise their dogma. They still think that it is daring, idealistic, and unconventional to denounce the rich. They still believe that money is the root of all evil-except government money, which is the solution to all problems.” ~ Ayn Rand
- “An individualist is a man who says: ‘I will not run anyone’s life – nor let anyone run mine. I will not rule or be ruled. I will not be a master nor a slave. I will not sacrifice myself to anyone – nor sacrifice anyone to myself.'” ~ Ayn Rand
- “Whoever claims the right to redistribute the wealth produced by others is claiming the right to treat human beings as chattel.” ~ Ayn Rand Quotes
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“It is not advisable to venture unsolicited opinions. You should spare yourself the embarrassing discovery of their exact value to your listener.” ~ Ayn Rand
- “An irresponsible person is a person who makes vague promises, then breaks his word, blames it on circumstances and expects other people to forgive it.” ~ Ayn Rand
- “I owe nothing to my brothers, nor do I gather debts from them. I ask none to live for me, nor do I live for any others. I covet no man’s soul, nor is my soul theirs to covet.” ~ Ayn Rand
- “We are now moving towards complete collectivism or socialism, a system under which everybody is enslaved to everybody.” ~ Ayn Rand
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“Believing in fate produces fate. Believing in freedom will create infinite possibilities.” ~ Ayn Rand
- “Do not make the mistake of the ignorant who think that an individualist is a man who says: “I’ll do as I please at everybody else’s expense.” An individualist is a man who recognizes the inalienable individual rights of man—his own and those of others.” ~ Ayn Rand
- “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 the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry.” ~ Ayn Rand
- “We are born into this world unarmed – our mind is our only weapon.” ~ Ayn Rand
- “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
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“It is a free market that makes monopolies impossible.” ~ Ayn Rand
- “The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t 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.” ~ Ayn Rand
- “Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible… it’s yours.” ~ Ayn Rand
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“The difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is a matter of time.” ~ Ayn Rand
- “Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority.” ~ Ayn Rand
- “Capitalism has been called a system of greed—yet it is the system that raised the standard of living of its poorest citizens to heights no collectivist system has ever begun to equal, and no tribal gang can conceive of.” ~ Ayn Rand
- “America’s founding ideal was the principle of individual rights. Nothing more and nothing less. The rest-everything that America achieved, everything she became, everything ‘noble and just,’ and heroic, and great, and unprecedented in human history-was the logical consequence of fidelity to that one principle.” ~ Ayn Rand
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“The essential characteristic of socialism is the denial of individual property rights.” ~ Ayn Rand
- “Love is not self-sacrifice, but the most profound assertion of your own needs and values. It is for your own happiness that you need the person you love, and that is the greatest compliment, the greatest tribute you can pay to that person.” ~ Ayn Rand, Ayn Rand quotes on love
- “The goal of the ‘liberals’ – as it emerges from the record of the past decades – was to smuggle this country into welfare statism by means of single, concrete, specific measures, enlarging the power of the government a step at a time, never permitting these steps to be summed up into principles, never permitting their direction to be identified or the basic issue to be named. Thus, statism was to come, not by vote or by violence, but by slow rot – by a long process of evasion and epistemological corruption, leading to a fait accompli.” ~ Ayn Rand
