Quote

Morality pertains only to the sphere of man's free will - only to those actions which are open to his 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
Open
Choices
Free
Pertains
Religion
Sphere
Action
Spheres
Men
Actions
Morality
Choice

More quotes by Ayn Rand

Image
The man without a purpose is a man who drifts at the mercy of random feelings or unidentified urges and is capable of any evil, because he is totally out of control of his own life. In order to be in control of your life, you have to have a purpose-a productive purpose.
Ayn Rand
Image
To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one's thinking to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one's mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.
Ayn Rand
Image
Love, friendship, respect, admiration are the emotional response of one man to the virtues of another, the spiritual payment given in exchange for the personal, selfish pleasure which one man derives from the virtues of another man’s character.
Ayn Rand
Image
Romantic art is always stylized: the better the art, the cleaner and more attractive and intelligent the stylization.
Ayn Rand
Image
The view that man was ever to be drawn by some vision of the unattainable shining ahead, doomed ever to aspire, but not to achieve, my life and my values could not bring me to that.
Ayn Rand
Image
The creed of sacrifice is a morality for the immoral.
Ayn Rand
Image
It was the greatest sensation of existence: not to trust but to know.
Ayn Rand
Image
It is futile to fight against, if one does not know what one is fighting for.
Ayn Rand
Image
When one turns from reason to faith, when one rejects the absolutism of reality, one undercuts the absolutism of one's consciousness - and one's mind becomes an organ one cannot trust any longer. It becomes what the mystics claim it to be: a tool of distortion.
Ayn Rand
Image
Capitalism and altruism are incompatible they are philosophical opposites they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society.
Ayn Rand
Image
I love you so much that nothing can matter to me - not even you...Only my love- not your answer. Not even your indifference
Ayn Rand
Image
Freedom of association includes the freedom not to associate.
Ayn Rand
Image
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
Image
The skyline of New York is a monument of a splendour that no pyramids or palaces will ever equal or approach.
Ayn Rand
Image
Value is that which one acts to gain and/or keep. Virtue is the act by which one aims and/or keeps it.
Ayn Rand
Image
What is morality, she asked. Judgement to distinguish right and wrong, vision to see the truth, and courage to act upon it, dedication to that which is good, integrity to stand by the good at any price.
Ayn Rand
Image
If a drought strikes them, animals perish--man builds irrigation canals if a flood strikes them, animals perish--man builds dams if a carnivorous pack attacks them, animals perish--man writes the Constitution of the United States.
Ayn Rand
Image
All the evils, abuses, and iniquities, popularly ascribed to businessmen and to capitalism, were not caused by an unregulated economy or by a free market, but by government intervention into the economy.
Ayn Rand
Image
Man has a single basic choice: to think or not, and that is the gauge of his virtue. Moral perfection is an unbreached rationality-not the degree of your intelligence, but the full and relentless use of your mind, not the extent of your knowledge, but the acceptance of reason as an absolute.
Ayn Rand
Image
Each man must live as an end in himself and follow his own rational self-interest.
Ayn Rand