Quote

The quickest way to kill the human spirit is to ask someone to do mediocre work.

Ayn Rand

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Spirit
Someone
Human
Humans
Quickest
Work
Mediocre
Way
Kill
Asks
Business

More quotes by Ayn Rand

Image
In order to deal with reality successfully - to pursue and achieve the values which his life requires - man needs self-esteem he needs to be confident of his efficacy and worth.
Ayn Rand
Image
A rational man is guided by his thinking - by a process of Reason - not by his feelings and desires.
Ayn Rand
Image
The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world
Ayn Rand
Image
Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed.
Ayn Rand
Image
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.
Ayn Rand
Image
It is true that the welfare-statists are not socialists, that they never advocated or intended the socialization of private property, that they want to 'preserve' private property-with government control of its use and disposal. But that is the fundamental characteristic of fascism.
Ayn Rand
Image
Have you noticed that the imbecile always smiles? Man's first frown is the first touch of God on his forehead. The touch of thought.
Ayn Rand
Image
Morally, the promise of an impossible “right” to economic security is an infamous attempt to abrogate the concept of rights. It can and does mean only one thing: a promise to enslave the men who produce, for the benefit of those who don’t.
Ayn Rand
Image
Even if smog were a risk to human life, we must remember that life in nature, without technology, is wholesale death.
Ayn Rand
Image
[Altruism] is a moral system which holds that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the sole justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, value and virtue. This is the moral base of collectivism, of all dictatorships.
Ayn Rand
Image
If men want to oppose war, it is statism that they must oppose.
Ayn Rand
Image
Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone.
Ayn Rand
Image
A desire presupposes the possibility of action to achieve it action presupposes a goal which is worth achieving.
Ayn Rand
Image
If it were true that men could achieve their good by means of turning some men into sacrificial animals, and ... if I were asked to serve the interests of society apart from, above and against my own I would refuse... I would fight in the full confidence of the justice of my battle and of a living being's right to exist.
Ayn Rand
Image
Indiscriminate tolerance and indiscriminate condemnation are not two opposites: they are two variants of the same evasion. To declare that “everybody is white” or “everybody is black” or “everybody is neither white nor black, but gray,” is not a moral judgment, but an escape from the responsibility of moral judgment.
Ayn Rand
Image
I am opposed to all forms of control. I am for an absolute, laissez-faire, free, unregulated economy.
Ayn Rand
Image
Love is our response to our highest values.
Ayn Rand
Image
A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.
Ayn Rand
Image
The creator's concern is the conquest of nature. The parasite's concern is the conquest of men.
Ayn Rand
Image
God... a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive.
Ayn Rand