“Do not make the mistake, at this point, of thinking that a worker is a slave and that he holds his job by his employer's permission. He does not hold it by permission - but by contract, that is, by a voluntary mutual agreement. A worker can quit his job; a slave cannot.”
Verified quotes
Ayn Rand quotes
74 verified quotes from Ayn Rand, each checked word-for-word against the archive's own full text.
“A leash is only a rope with a noose on both ends.”
“From the smallest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from one attribute of man – the function of his reasoning mind.”
“In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it's yours.”
“It is my eyes which see, and the sight of my eyes grants beauty to the earth. It is my ears which hear, and the hearing of my ears gives its song to the world. It is my mind which thinks, and the judgment of my mind is the only searchlight that can find the truth. It is my will which chooses, and the choice of my will is the only edict I must respect.”
“Why ask useless questions? How deep is the ocean? How high is the sky? Who is John Galt?”
“If you are the kind of person who knows that reality is not your enemy, that truth and knowledge are of crucial, personal, selfish importance to you and to your own life—then, the more passionately personal the thinking, the clearer and truer.”
“In order to survive, man has to discover and produce everything he needs, which means that he has to alter his background and adapt it to his needs. [...] From the most primitive cultures to the most advanced civilizations, man has had to manufacture things; his well-being depends on his success at production.”
“Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries.”
“To the extent that a man is guided by his rational judgment, he acts in accordance with the requirements of his nature and, to that extent, succeeds in achieving a human form of survival and well-being; to the extent that he acts irrationally, he acts as his own destroyer.”
“The notion of racial quotas is so obviously an expression of racism that no lengthy discussion is necessary. If a young man is barred from a school or a job because the quota for his particular race has been filled, he is barred by reason of his race. Telling him that those admitted are his 'representatives' is adding insult to injury. To demand such quotas in the name of fighting racial discrimination is an obscene mockery.”
“Money is the barometer of a society's virtue.”
“The Dean: "Do you mean to tell me that you're thinking seriously of building that way, when and if you are an architect?" Roark: "Yes." Dean: "My dear fellow, who will let you?" Roark: "That's not the point. The point is, who will stop me?"”
“There is no such thing as a lousy job - only lousy men who don't care to do it.”
“Do not ever say that the desire to "do good" by force is a good motive.”
“The purpose of all art is the objectification of values.”
“Existence exists and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists.”
“The ladder of success is best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity.”
“One of the methods used by statists to destroy capitalism consists in establishing controls that tie a given industry hand and foot, making it unable to solve its problems, then declaring that freedom has failed and stronger controls are necessary.”
“There can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob.”
“"Do you mean to tell me that you’re thinking seriously of building that way, when and if you are an architect?" "Yes." "My dear fellow, who will let you?" "That’s not the point. The point is, who will stop me?"”
“Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.”
“I shall choose friends among men, but neither slaves nor masters. And I shall choose only such as please me, and them I shall love and respect, but neither command nor obey. And we shall join our hands when we wish, or walk alone when we so desire.”
“Whether you know the shape of a pebble or the structure of a solar system, the axioms remain the same: that it exists and that you know it.”
“The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.”
“One can not be a traitor to anything, except to oneself.”
“The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it.”
“There are four characteristics which brand a country unmistakably as a dictatorship: one-party rule; executions without trial or with a mock trial, for political offenses; the nationalization or expropriation of private property; and censorship. A country guilty of these outrages forfeits any moral prerogatives, any claim to national rights or sovereignty, and becomes an outlaw.”
“Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another, their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.”
“Philosophy studies the fundamental nature of existence, of man, and of man's relationship to existence. In the realm of cognition, the special sciences are the trees, but philosophy is the soil which makes the forest possible.”
“Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.”
“I refuse to apologize for my ability - I refuse to apologize for my success - I refuse to apologize for my money. If this is evil, make the most of it.”
“Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone.”
“Thinking men cannot be ruled; ambitious men do not stagnate.”
“Thinking men cannot be ruled.”
“City smog and filthy rivers are not good for men (though they are not the kind of danger that the ecological panic-mongers proclaim them to be). This is a scientific, technological problem - not a political one - and it can be solved only by technology. Even if smog were a risk to human life, we must remember that life in nature, without technology, is wholesale death.”
“Romantic art is the fuel and the spark plug of a man's soul; its task is to set a soul on fire and never let it go out.”
“Do not make the mistake [...] of thinking that a worker is a slave and that he holds his job by his employer's permission. He does not hold it by permission - but by contract, that is, by a voluntary mutual agreement. A worker can quit his job; a slave cannot.”
“Love, friendship, respect, admiration are the emotional response of one man to the virtues of another, the spiritual payment given in exchange for the personal, selfish pleasure which one man derives from the virtues of another man's character.”
“Businessmen are the one group that distinguishes capitalism and the American way of life from the totalitarian statism that is swallowing the rest of the world. All the other social groups - workers, farmers, professional men, scientists, soldiers - exist under dictatorships, even though they exist in chains, in terror, in misery, and in progressive self-destruction. But there is no such group as businessmen under a dictatorship. Their place is taken by armed thugs: by bureaucrats and commissars. Businessmen are the symbol of a free society - the symbol of America.”
“Fight with the radiant certainty and the absolute rectitude of knowing that yours is the morality of life and yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth.”
“To say 'I love you' one must first be able to say the 'I.'”
“Reason integrates man's perceptions by means of forming abstractions or conceptions, thus raising man's knowledge from the perceptual level, which he shares with animals, to the conceptual level, which he alone can reach. The method which reason employs in this process is logic - and logic is the art of non-contradictory identification.”
“A crime is the violation of the right(s) of other men by force (or fraud). It is only the initiation of physical force against others - i.e. the recourse to violence - that can be classified as a crime in a free society (as distinguished from a civil wrong). Ideas, in a free society, are not a crime - and neither can they serve as the justification of a crime.”
“Since time immemorial and pre-industrial, 'greed' has been the accusation hurled at the rich by the concrete-bound illiterates who were unable to conceive of the source of wealth or of the motivation of those who produce it.”
“Observe the intensity, the austere, the unsmiling seriousness with which an infant watches the world around him. If you ever find, in an adult, that degree of seriousness about reality, you will have found a great man.”
“I am, therefore I'll think.”
“An inventor is a man who asks 'Why?' of the universe and lets nothing stand between the answer and his mind.”
“The proof of an achieved self-esteem is your soul's shudder of contempt and rebellion against the role of a sacrificial animal, against the vile impertinence of any creed that proposes to immolate the irreplaceable value which is your consciousness and the incomparable glory which is your existence.”
“Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think.”
“The three cardinal values of the Objectivist ethics—the three values which, together, are the means to and the realization of one’s ultimate value, one’s own life—are: Reason, Purpose, Self-Esteem, with their three corresponding virtues: Rationality, Productiveness, Pride.”
“Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life.”
“I swear by my life, and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”
“No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the sum of his knowledge.”
“Beauty is a sense of harmony.”
“America is the land of the uncommon man. It is the land where man is free to develop his genius - and to get its just rewards.”
“Why is it so important - what others have done? Why does it become sacred by the mere fact of not being your own? Why is anyone and everyone right - so long as it's not yourself? Why does the number of those others take the place of truth? Why is truth made a mere matter or arithmetic - and only of addition at that? Why is everything twisted out of all sense to fit everything else? There must be some reason. I don't know. I've never known it. I'd like to understand.”
“In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.”
“Train your mind to concretize every abstraction as a general policy. As with typing, it is only at first that you have to do it by conscious, measured steps. Eventually it becomes an automatic mental habit.”
“Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting for us in our graves – or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.”
“Anyone who fights for the future lives in it today.”
“Reason and morality are the only weapons that determine the course of history. The collectivists dropped them, because they had no right to carry them. Pick them up; you have.”
“Guilt is a rope that wears thin.”
“The only real moral crime that one man can commit against another is the attempt to create, by his words or actions, an impression of the contradictory, the impossible, the irrational, and thus shake the concept of rationality in his victim.”
“The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.”
“Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality.”
“I never found beauty in longing for the impossible and never found the possible to be beyond my reach.”
“The most depraved type of human being is the man without a purpose.”
“The truth is not for all men, but only for those who seek it.”
“There has never been a philosophy, a theory or a doctrine, that attacked (or 'limited') reason, which did not preach submission to the power of some authority.”
“The skyline of New York is a monument of a splendour that no pyramids or palaces will ever equal or approach.”
“Life is the reward of virtue. And happiness is the goal and reward of life.”
“To fear to face an issue is to believe the worst is true.”
“Volumes can be and have been written about the issue of freedom versus dictatorship, but, in essence, it comes down to a single question: Do you consider it moral to treat men as sacrificial animals and to rule them by physical force?”