Quote

You have no choice about your capacity to feel that something is good for you or evil, but what you will consider good or evil, what will give you joy or pain, what you will love or hate, desire or fear, depends on your standard of value.

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
Love
Hate
Depends
Fear
Value
Give
Joy
Feel
Choices
Standard
Feels
Values
Consider
Giving
Evil
Standards
Something
Pain
Capacity
Good
Desire
Choice

More quotes by Ayn Rand

Image
Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes.
Ayn Rand
Image
The creator's concern is the conquest of nature. The parasite's concern is the conquest of men.
Ayn Rand
Image
Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.
Ayn Rand
Image
I am only concerned with politics so I may see the day when I don't have to be concerned with politics.
Ayn Rand
Image
To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That's what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul - would you understand why that's much harder?
Ayn Rand
Image
Let no man posture as an advocate of peace if he proposes or supports any social system that initiates the use of force against individual men, in any form.
Ayn Rand
Image
I am unwilling to be wholly good—and please don't regard me as wholly evil!
Ayn Rand
Image
The greatest threat to mankind and civilization is the spread of the totalitarian philosophy. Its best ally is not the devotion of its followers but the confusion of its enemies. To fight it, we must understand it.
Ayn Rand
Image
The right to vote is a consequence, not a primary cause, of a free social system - and its value depends on the constitutional structure implementing and strictly delimiting the voters' power unlimited majority rule is an instance of the principle of tyranny.
Ayn Rand
Image
To the extent to which a man is rational, life is the premise directing his actions. To the extent to which he is irrational, the premise directing his actions is death.
Ayn Rand
Image
When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion...th at in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing-you may know that your society is doomed.
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
Whatever road I take, the guiding star is within me the guiding star and the loadstone which point the way. They point in but one direction. They point to me.
Ayn Rand
Image
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.
Ayn Rand
Image
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
Image
Creation comes before distribution -- or there will be nothing to distribute.
Ayn Rand
Image
Face a challenge and find joy in the capacity to meet it.
Ayn Rand
Image
Without property rights, no other rights are possible.
Ayn Rand
Image
The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word 'selfishness' is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual 'package-deal,' which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind.
Ayn Rand
Image
The only thing that matters my goal my reward my beginning my end is the work itself. My work done my way. A private personal selfish egotistical motivation. That’s the only way I function. That’s all I am.
Ayn Rand