Quotes from Ayn Rand

Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer - and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.

Thinking men cannot be ruled; ambitious men do not stagnate.

A rational man is guided by his thinking - by a process of Reason - not by his feelings and desires.

In the temple of his spirit, each man is alone.

To achieve, you need thought

I say that man is entitled to his own happiness and that he must achieve it himself. But that he cannot demand that others give up their lives to make him happy.

An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.

A government is the most dangerous threat to man

The mark of an honest man... is that he means what he says and knows what he means.

The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap.

I am a man who does not exist for others.

You must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the secondary consequences.

Every period ruled by mystics was an era of stagnation and want, when most men were on strike against existence.

What is man? He's just a collection of chemicals with delusions of grandeur.

The man who produces while others dispose of his product is a slave.

Independence is the only gauge of human virtue and value. What a man is and makes of himself; not what he has or hasn't done for others. There is no substitute for personal dignity.

The man who attempts to live for others is a dependent. He is a parasite in motive and makes parasites of those he serves.

Capitalism is our only moral system. All other systems take advantage of man's rights and liberties.

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

A culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiate d masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.

A mystic is a man who treats his feelings as tools of cognition.

Do you know the hallmark of the second-rater? It's resentment of another man's achievement.

Every honest man lives for himself. Every man worth calling a man lives for himself. The one who doesn't - doesn't live at all.

The mind is the attribute of man. When man is born, he comes into existence with only one weapon with him--The reasoning mind.