Quote

No one's happiness but my own is in my power to achieve or to destroy.

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
Addiction
Destroy
Achieve
Happiness
Power

More quotes by Ayn Rand

Image
Face a challenge and find joy in the capacity to meet it.
Ayn Rand
Image
Collectivism, as an intellectual power and a moral ideal, is dead. But freedom and individualism, and their political expression, capitalism, have not yet been discovered.
Ayn Rand
Image
The age of the skyscraper is gone. This is the age of the housing project. Which is always a prelude to the age of the cave.
Ayn Rand
Image
To deal with men by force is as impractical as to deal with nature by persuasion.
Ayn Rand
Image
He walked, groping for a sentence that hung in his mind as an empty shape. He could neither fill it or dismiss it.
Ayn Rand
Image
I am unwilling to be wholly good—and please don't regard me as wholly evil!
Ayn Rand
Image
Reason can be fought with reason. How are you going to fight the unreasonable? The trouble with you, my dear, and with most people, is that you don’t have sufficient respect for the senseless. The senseless is the major factor in our lives. You have no chance if it is your enemy.
Ayn Rand
Image
To know one's own desires, their meaning and their costs requires the highest human virtue: rationality.
Ayn Rand
Image
Morality pertains only to the sphere of man's free will - only to those actions which are open to his choice.
Ayn Rand
Image
If parasitism, favoritism, corruption, and greed for the unearned did not exist, a mixed economy would bring them into existence.
Ayn Rand
Image
Life is the reward of virtue. And happiness is the goal and reward of life.
Ayn Rand
Image
But there are people who'll try to hurt you through the good they see in you--knowing that it's the good, needing it and punishing you for it. Don't let it break you when you discover that.
Ayn Rand
Image
Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artists metaphysical value judgments.
Ayn Rand
Image
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.
Ayn Rand
Image
The only man never to be redeemed is the man without passion.
Ayn Rand
Image
There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.
Ayn Rand
Image
Rights are not a matter of numbers - and there can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob.
Ayn Rand
Image
Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy . . . Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values, and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions.
Ayn Rand
Image
One can study what exists and how consciousness functions but one cannot analyze (or “prove”) existence as such, or consciousness as such. These are irreducible primaries. (An attempt to “prove” them is self-contradict ory: it is an attempt to “prove” existence by means of nonexistence, and consciousness by means of unconsciousness .)
Ayn Rand
Image
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.
Ayn Rand