Quote

Reality confronts man with a great many musts, but all of them are conditional the formula of realistic necessity is You must, if and the if stands for man's choice

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
Choice
Choices
Confronts
Reality
Conditional
Many
Formula
Must
Formulas
Great
Realistic
Men
Necessity
Stands

More quotes by Ayn Rand

Image
Mysticism requires the notion of the unknowable, which is revealed to some and withheld from others this divides men into those who feel guilt and those who cash in on it.
Ayn Rand
Image
The Founding Fathers were neither passive, death-worshipin g mystics nor mindless, power-seeking looters as a political group they were a phenomenon unprecedented in history: they were thinkers who were also men of action.
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
When the common good of a society is regarded as something apart from and superior to the individual good of its members, it means that the good of some men takes precedence over the good of others, with those others consigned to the status of sacrificial animals.
Ayn Rand
Image
Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgement and nothing can help you escape it - that no substitute can do your thinking, as no pinch-hitter can live your life.
Ayn Rand
Image
The mark of an honest man... is that he means what he says and knows what he means.
Ayn Rand
Image
One must differentiate between one's thoughts and one's emotions with full clarity and precision...No discussion, cooperation, agreement, or understanding is possible among men who substitute emotion for proof.
Ayn Rand
Image
The only man never to be redeemed is the man without passion.
Ayn Rand
Image
If the truth shall kill them, let them die.
Ayn Rand
Image
...if men are to be ruled, then the enemy is reason.
Ayn Rand
Image
I cannot stand Tolstoy, and reading him was the most boring literary duty I ever had to perform, his philosophy and his sense of life are not merely mistaken, but evil, and yet, from a purely literary viewpoint, on his own terms, I have to evaluate him as a good writer.
Ayn Rand
Image
She fell asleep, lying there, her hand clasping his. Her last awareness, before she surrendered the responsibility of consciousness, was the sense of an enormous void, the void of a city and of a continent, where she would never be able to find the man whom she had no right to seek.
Ayn Rand
Image
You know, I think that only if one feels immensely important can one feel truly light.
Ayn Rand
Image
Love is our response to our highest values.
Ayn Rand
Image
You seek escape from pain. We seek the achievement of happiness. You exist for the sake of avoiding punishment. We exist for the sake of earning rewards. Threats will not make us function fear is not our incentive. It is not death that we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to live
Ayn Rand
Image
The action required to sustain human life is primarily intellectual everything man needs has to be discovered by his mind and produced by his effort.
Ayn Rand
Image
An emotion as much tells you nothing about reality, beyond the fact that something makes you feel something.
Ayn Rand
Image
There were things in my past which I have not liked. But all the things of which I was proud will remain.
Ayn Rand
Image
The right to life means that a man has the right to support his life by his own work (on any economic level, as high as his ability will carry him) it does not mean that others must provide him with the necessities of life.
Ayn Rand
Image
The creed of sacrifice is a morality for the immoral.
Ayn Rand