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Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer - and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.
Ayn Rand
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Ayn Rand
Age: 77 †
Born: 1905
Born: February 2
Died: 1982
Died: March 6
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Philosopher
Playwright
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
St. Petersburg
Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum
Acted
Species
Living
History
Power
Way
Objectivism
Men
Destroyer
Destroyers
More quotes by Ayn Rand
If the rest of them can survive only by destroying us, then why should we wish them to survive? . . . Nothing can make it moral to destroy the best. One can't be punished for being good. One can't be penalized for ability.
Ayn Rand
A rational man is guided by his thinking - by a process of Reason - not by his feelings and desires.
Ayn Rand
In a capitalist society, all human relationships are voluntary. Men are free to cooperate or not, to deal with one another or not, as their own individual judgments, convictions and interests dictate.
Ayn Rand
but their eyes were as cold blue glass buttons.
Ayn Rand
The skyline of New York is a monument of a splendour that no pyramids or palaces will ever equal or approach.
Ayn Rand
Just as man can't exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one's rights into reality, to think, to work and keep the results, which means: the right of property.
Ayn Rand
Thousands of years ago the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burnt at the stake he'd taught his brothers to light, but he left them a gift they had not conceived and he lifted darkness from the face of the Earth.
Ayn Rand
I will not die, it's the world that will end. paraphrase of unknown philosopher
Ayn Rand
There is only one institution that can arrogate to itself the power legally to trade by means of rubber checks: the government. And it is the only institution that can mortgage your future without your knowledge or consent: government securities (and paper money) are promissory notes on future tax receipts, i.e., on your future production.
Ayn Rand
Many words have been granted me, and some are wise, and some are false, but only three are holy: I will it!
Ayn Rand
To love is to value. Only a rationally selfish man, a man of self esteem, is capable of love - because he is the only man capable of holding firm, consistent, uncompromising, unbetrayed value. The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone
Ayn Rand
It is futile to fight against, if one does not know what one is fighting for.
Ayn Rand
Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it.
Ayn Rand
Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think.
Ayn Rand
You'd let the whole world perish rather than soil that immaculate self of yours with a single spot of which you'd have to be ashamed.
Ayn Rand
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.
Ayn Rand
We are one...alone...and only...and we love you who are one...alone...and only. We looked into each other's eyes and we knew the breath of a miracle had touched us, and fled, and left us groping vainly. And we felt torn, torn for some word we could not find.
Ayn Rand
When one turns from reason to faith, when one rejects the absolutism of reality, one undercuts the absolutism of one's consciousness - and one's mind becomes an organ one cannot trust any longer. It becomes what the mystics claim it to be: a tool of distortion.
Ayn Rand
Civilization does not have to perish. The brutes are winning only by default.
Ayn Rand
Ideas, in a free society, are not a crime- and neither can they serve as the justification of a crime.
Ayn Rand
