Quotes by Ayn Rand

"The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live."

"There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil."

"From the smallest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from one attribute of man - the function of his reasoning mind."

"The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see."

"The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me."

"Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins."

"People create their own questions because they are afraid to look straight. All you have to do is look straight and see the road, and when you see it, don't sit looking at it - walk."

"We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force."

"Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual)."

"Just as man can't exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one's rights into reality, to think, to work and keep the results, which means: the right of property."

"Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law."

"To achieve, you need thought. You have to know what you are doing and that's real power."

"Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice."

"A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others."

"Money is the barometer of a society's virtue."

"So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of all money?"

"Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver."

"Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason."

"Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision."

"If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject."