Quote

A 'whim' is a desire experienced by a person who does not know and does not care to discover its cause.

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
Cause
Causes
Desire
Doe
Care
Whimsy
Persons
Whim
Person
Experienced
Discover

More quotes by 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
Ever since Kant divorced reason from reality, his intellectual descendants have been diligently widening the breach.
Ayn Rand
Image
In order to be in control of your life, you have to have a purpose-a productive purpose.
Ayn Rand
Image
Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage-the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterologic al traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry.
Ayn Rand
Image
You love only those who deserve it.
Ayn Rand
Image
Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting for us in our graves - or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.
Ayn Rand
Image
The mark of an honest man... is that he means what he says and knows what he means.
Ayn Rand
Image
As long as men are free to speak, a small, rational minority will always prevail over an irrational majority.
Ayn Rand
Image
An idea is a light turned on in a man's soul. Comic-strip artists are in the habit of representing it by means of a light bulb flashing on, above the head of a character who has suddenly grasped an idea. In simple, primitive terms, this is an appropriate symbol.
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
Collectivism requires self-sacrifice, the subordination of one's interests to those of others.
Ayn Rand
Image
Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind, and a step that travels unlimited roads.
Ayn Rand
Image
That something happened to you is of no importance to anyone, not even to you. The important thing about you is what you choose to make happen - your values and choices. That which happened by accident - what family you were born into, in what country, and where you went to school - is totally unimportant.
Ayn Rand
Image
What objectivity and the study of philosophy requires is not an 'open mind,' but an active mind - a mind able and eagerly willing to examine ideas, but to examine them criticially.
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
If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man's only moral commandment is: Thou shalt think. But a 'moral commandment' is a contradiction in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.
Ayn Rand
Image
Words are a lens to focus one's mind.
Ayn Rand
Image
A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.
Ayn Rand
Image
Selfishness does not mean only to do things for one's self. One may do things, affecting others, for his own pleasure and benefit. This is not immoral, but the highest of morality.
Ayn Rand
Image
Pleasure is nought but virtue's gayer name-- I wrong her still, I rate her worth too low: Virtue the root, and pleasure is the flow'r.
Ayn Rand