Ayn Rand (1905-1982)

Quotes

• Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man’s values, it has to be earned.

• Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by fraud.

• Integrity is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your consciousness, just as honesty is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake existence.

• Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it.

• Rationality is the recognition of the fact that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it.

• Love is our response to our highest values. Love is self-enjoyment. The noblest love is born out of admiration of another’s values.

• Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing buy rational actions.

• Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of other men. Blood, whips and guns--or dollars. Take your choice--there is no other.

• Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplacable spark. In the hopeless swamps of the not quite, the not yet, and the not at all, do not let the hero in your soul perish and leave only frustration for the life you deserved, but never have been able to reach. The world you desire can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.

• The secrets of this earth are not for all men to see, but only for those who seek them.

• Doctors are not servants of their patients, they are traders like everyone else in a free society and they should bear that title proudly considering the crucial importance of the services they offer.

• Art is the indespensible medium for the communication of a moral idea.

• The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind.

• A good novel is an indivisible sum; every scene, sequence and passage of a good novel has to involve, contribute to and advance all three of its major attributes: theme, plot, characterization.

• If men want to oppose war, it is *statism* that they must oppose.

• Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value judgments.

• An artist does not fake reality--he *stylizes* it.

• James, you ought to discover some day that words have an exact meaning.

• He was guilty of nothing, except that he earned his own fortune and never forgot that it was his.

• Morality is judgement to distinguish right and wrong, vision to see the truth, courage to act upon it, dedication to that which is good, and integrity to stand by it at any price.