Quote

It's a rare gift, you know, to feel reverence for your own life and to want the best, the greatest, the highest possible, here, now, for your very own.

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
Gift
Highest
Greatest
Possible
Best
Feel
Feels
Reverence
Life
Rare

More quotes by Ayn Rand

Image
To know one's own desires, their meaning and their costs requires the highest human virtue: rationality.
Ayn Rand
Image
She had learned, in the slums of her childhood, that honest people were never touchy about the matter of being trusted.
Ayn Rand
Image
Love is our response to our highest values. Love is self-enjoyment. The noblest love is born out of admiration of another's values.
Ayn Rand
Image
Why do they always teach us that it's easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It's the hardest thing in the world--to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want.
Ayn Rand
Image
She stood at the window, her arms spread wide, holding on to each side of the frame, it was as if she held a piece of the city.
Ayn Rand
Image
The government was set to protect man from criminals-and the constitution was written to protect man from the government. The Bill of Rights was not directed at private citizens, but against the government-as an explicit declaration that individual rights supersede any public or social power.
Ayn Rand
Image
The government has created a nation of paper criminals. People can be put in jail and lose civil rights and liberties through bureaucratic procedures.The only thing that is keeping you out of jail is government goodwill.
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
She did not know the nature of her loneliness. The only words that named it were: This is not the world I expected.
Ayn Rand
Image
There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.
Ayn Rand
Image
John Galt is Prometheus who changed his mind. After centuries of being torn by vultures in payment for having brought to men the fire of the gods, he broke his chains—and he withdrew his fire—until the day when men withdraw their vultures.
Ayn Rand
Image
Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman's tool is values the bureaucrat's tool is fear.
Ayn Rand
Image
If you tell an ugly woman that she is beautiful, you offer her the great homage of corrupting the concept of beauty.
Ayn Rand
Image
If one doesn't respect oneself one can have neither love nor respect for others.
Ayn Rand
Image
Every period ruled by mystics was an era of stagnation and want, when most men were on strike against existence.
Ayn Rand
Image
Guilt is altruism's stock in trade, and the inducing of guilt is its only means of self-perpetuati on.
Ayn Rand
Image
Words are a lens to focus one's mind.
Ayn Rand
Image
A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race - and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin.
Ayn Rand
Image
Faith and force ... are corollaries: every period of history dominated by mysticism, was a period of statism, of dictatorship, of tyranny.
Ayn Rand
Image
Truth is the recognition of reality reason, man's only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.
Ayn Rand