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Each man must live as an end in himself and follow his own rational self-interest.
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
Must
Men
Rational
Follow
Interest
Ends
Live
Self
More quotes by Ayn Rand
Love should be treated like a business deal, but every business deal has its own terms and its own currency. And in love, the currency is virtue. You love people not for what you do for them or what they do for you. You love them for the values, the virtues, which they have achieved in their own character.
Ayn Rand
Don't consider our interests or desires. You have no duty to anyone but yourself.
Ayn Rand
The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man's self-defense, and, as such, may only resort to force only against those who start the use of force.
Ayn Rand
Face a challenge and find joy in the capacity to meet it.
Ayn Rand
A viler evil than to murder a man, is to sell him suicide as an act of virtue.
Ayn Rand
I can accept anything, except what seems to be the easiest for most people: the half-way, the almost, the just-about, the in-between.
Ayn Rand
Rationalization is a process of not perceiving reality, but of attempting to make reality fit one’s emotions.
Ayn Rand
It is a policeman’s duty to retrieve stolen property and return it to its owners. But when robbery becomes the purpose of the law, and the policeman’s duty becomes, not protection, but the plunder of property - then it is an outlaw who has to become a policeman.
Ayn Rand
Romantic art is always stylized: the better the art, the cleaner and more attractive and intelligent the stylization.
Ayn Rand
As we gain knowledge, we do not become more certain, we become certain of more.
Ayn Rand
Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked: 'Account Overdrawn.'
Ayn Rand
That which is not worth contemplating in life, is not worth recreating in art.
Ayn Rand
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
Even if smog were a risk to human life, we must remember that life in nature, without technology, is wholesale death.
Ayn Rand
Any group or collective, large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members.
Ayn Rand
Love is an expression and assertion of self-esteem, a response to one's own values in the person of another. One gains a profoundly personal, selfish joy from the mere existence of the person one loves. It is one's own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns, and derives from love.
Ayn Rand
There’s nothing as significant as a human face. Nor as eloquent. We can never really know another person, except by our first glance at him. Because, in that glance, we know everything. Even though we’re not always wise enough to unravel the knowledge.
Ayn Rand
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
To say ‘I love you’ one must first know how to say the ‘I.’ The meaning of the ‘I’ is an independent, self-sufficient entity that does not exist for the sake of any other person. A person who exists only for the sake of his loved one is not an independent entity, but a spiritual parasite. The love of a parasite is worth nothing.
Ayn Rand
Identify the dominant philosophy of a society and you can predict its future.
Ayn Rand