Ayn Rand
.Authors
.Quotes
2026-09-27 11:23:32
Any man who’s afraid of hiring the best ability he can find, is a cheat who’s in a business where he doesn’t belong. To me—the foulest man on earth, more contemptible than a criminal, is the employer who rejects men for being too good.
2026-09-27 11:22:09
there’s no such thing as a lousy job—only lousy men who don’t care to do it.
2026-09-27 11:20:49
There wasn’t a man rich and smart enough but that he didn’t think that somebody was richer and smarter, and this plan would give him a share of his better’s wealth and brain. But while he was thinking that he’d get unearned benefits from the men above, he forgot about the men below who’d get unearned benefits, too. He forgot about all his inferiors who’d rush to drain him just as he hoped to drain his superiors. The worker who liked the idea that his need entitled him to a limousine like his boss’s, forgot that every bum and beggar on earth would come howling that their need entitled them to an icebox like his own.
2026-09-27 11:19:02
learn to understand the nature of your own power and you’ll understand the paradox you now see around you. You do not have to depend on any material possessions, they depend on you, you create them, you own the one and only tool of production. Wherever you are, you will always be able to produce. But the looters—by their own stated theory—are in desperate, permanent, congenital need and at the blind mercy of matter.
2026-09-27 11:14:27
When one acts on pity against justice, it is the good whom one punishes for the sake of the evil; when one saves the guilty from suffering, it is the innocent whom one forces to suffer. There is no escape from justice, nothing can be unearned and unpaid for in the universe, neither in matter nor in spirit—and if the guilty do not pay, then the innocent have to pay it.
2026-09-27 11:11:10
A viler evil than to murder a man, is to sell him suicide as an act of virtue.
2026-09-27 11:01:38
There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.
2026-09-27 10:59:38
…do you know the hallmark of the second-rater? It’s resentment of another man’s achievement.
2026-09-27 10:58:17
name a person more evil than the man with a heart closed to pity. The man who uses another’s pity for him as a weapon.
2026-09-27 10:54:39
It is not advisable… to venture unsolicited opinions. You should spare yourself the embarrassing discovery of their exact value to your listener.
2023-01-02 07:49:46
Socialism is the doctrine that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that his life and his work do not belong to him, but belong to society, that the only justification of his existence is his service to society, and that society may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good.
2019-03-14 22:37:49
It takes two to make every great career: the man who is great, and the man—almost rarer—who is great enough to see greatness and say so.
2019-03-14 22:37:20
I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York’s skyline
2019-03-14 22:37:19
I’d have no desire to penalize a man because he’s worth only fifteen dollars a week. But I’ll be damned if I can see why a man worth forty must be penalized—and penalized in favor of the one who’s less competent
