30 Ayn Rand Quotes On Selfishness, Capitalism From Atlas Shrugged & More
“Ayn Rand” by “Democracy Chronicles“, licensed under Public Domain Mark 1.0
Ayn Rand was a Russian American writer and philosopher. Her original name was Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum. She was born on February 02, 1905. After education, she moved to the United States in 1926. She is known for her fiction and developing a philosophical system she named Objectivism. She wrote short stories, plays, novels and screenplays. She achieved fame with her 1943 novel, The Fountainhead and the 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged.
Her novels promote individualism and laissez-faire capitalism, which were influential among conservatives and libertarians and popular among generations of young people in the United States from the mid-20th century. Below we have consolidated Ayn Rand quotes on selfishness, capitalism, love from Atlas Shrugged & more. Check out!
Ayn Rand Quotes From Atlas Shrugged
The Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand was published in 1957. Its theme (as Rand described it) is “the role of man’s mind in existence”. The book explores many philosophical themes from which Rand would subsequently develop Objectivism. Here are famous quotes from this novel.
“If you don’t know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn.”
AYN RAND
SOURCE: The ATLAS SHRUGGED
“I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”
AYN RAND
SOURCE: THE ATLAS SHRUGGED
“Never think of pain or danger or enemies a moment longer than is necessary to fight them.”
AYN RAND
SOURCE: THE ATLAS SHRUGGED
“I never found beauty in longing for the impossible and never found the possible to be beyond my reach.”
AYN RAND
SOURCE: THE ATLAS SHRUGGED
“What greater wealth is there than to own your life and to spend it on growing? Every living thing must grow. It can’t stand still. It must grow or perish.”
AYN RAND
SOURCE: THE ATLAS SHRUGGED
SOURCE: THE ATLAS SHRUGGED
“Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter.”
AYN RAND
SOURCE: THE ATLAS SHRUGGED
“There is no such thing as a lousy job – only lousy men who don’t care to do it.”
AYN RAND
SOURCE: THE ATLAS SHRUGGED
“Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.”
AYN RAND
SOURCE: THE ATLAS SHRUGGED
“Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.”
AYN RAND
SOURCE: THE ATLAS SHRUGGED
Ayn Rand Quotes On Selfishness
Ayn Rand rejects altruism and believes in selfishness. She argues that the ultimate moral value, for each human individual, is his or her own well-being. Let’s take a look at some of Ayn Rand quotes on Selfishness.
“Not selfishness, but precisely the absence of a self. Look at them. The man who cheats and lies, but preserves a respectable front. He knows himself to be dishonest, but others think he’s honest and he derives his self-respect from that, second-hand. The man who takes credit for an achievement which is not his own. He knows himself to be mediocre, but he’s great in the eyes of others.”
AYN RAND
SOURCE: THE AYN RAND LEXICON: OBJECTIVISM FROM A TO Z
SOURCE: FOR THE NEW INTELLECTUAL: THE PHILOSOPHY OF AYN RAND
“Why is it immoral for you to desire, but moral for others to do so? Why is it immoral to produce a value and keep it, but moral to give it away? And if it is not moral for you to keep a value, why is it moral for others to accept it? If you are selfless and virtuous when you give it, are they not selfish and vicious when they take it?“
AYN RAND
SOURCE: THE AYN RAND LEXICON: OBJECTIVISM FROM A TO Z
“Selfishness does not mean only to do things for one’s self. One may do things, affecting others, for his own pleasure and benefit. This is not immoral, but the highest of morality.”
AYN RAND
SOURCE: JOURNALS OF AYN RAND
“The attack on “selfishness” is an attack on man’s self-esteem; to surrender one, is to surrender the other.”
AYN RAND
SOURCE: THE VIRTUE OF SELFISHNESS
“The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word ‘selfishness’ is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual ‘package-deal,’ which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind.”
AYN RAND
SOURCE: THE VIRTUE OF SELFISHNESS
Ayn Rand Quotes About Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Let’s read some of Ayn Rand quotes about Capitalism to gain more insight.
“The majority of those who are loosely identified by the term ‘liberals’ are afraid to let themselves discover that what they advocate is statism. They want to keep all the advantages and effects of capitalism, while destroying the cause, and they want to establish statism without its necessary effects. They do not want to know or to admit that they are the champions of dictatorship and slavery.“
AYN RAND
SOURCE: THE AYN RAND LEXICON: OBJECTIVISM FROM A TO Z
SOURCE: THE RETURN OF THE PRIMITIVE: THE ANTI-INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
“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
SOURCE: THE AYN RAND LEXICON: OBJECTIVISM FROM A TO Z
“Capitalism demands the best of every man – his rationality – and rewards him accordingly. It leaves every man free to choose the work he likes, to specialize in it, to trade his product for the products of others, and to go as far on the road of achievement as his ability and ambition will carry him.”
AYN RAND
SOURCE: FOR THE NEW INTELLECTUAL: THE PHILOSOPHY OF AYN RAND (50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION)
“One of the methods used by statists to destroy capitalism consists in establishing controls that tie a given industry hand and foot, making it unable to solve its problems, then declaring that freedom has failed and stronger controls are necessary.”
AYN RAND
SOURCE: THE VOICE OF REASON: ESSAYS IN OBJECTIVIST THOUGHT
“All the evils, abuses, and iniquities, popularly ascribed to businessmen and to capitalism, were not caused by an unregulated economy or by a free market, but by government intervention into the economy.”
SOURCE: CAPITALISM: THE UNKNOWN IDEAL
Ayn Rand Quotes About Love
While most people think that love is an expression of unselfishness, Rand’s perspective is the complete opposite. Here are the top picked Ayn Rand quotes on love.
“Love is the expression of one’s values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.”
AYN RAND
SOURCE: AYN RAND READER
“Love is an expression and assertion of self-esteem, a response to one’s own values in the person of another. One gains a profoundly personal, selfish joy from the mere existence of the person one loves. It is one’s own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns, and derives from love.”
AYN RAND
SOURCE: THE VIRTUE OF SELFISHNESS
“You know what you are actually in love with? Integrity. The impossible. The clean, consistent, reasonable, self-faithful, the all-of-one-style, like a work of art.”
AYN RAND
SOURCE: THE FOUNTAINHEAD
“Some day, the world will discover that, without thought, there can be no love.”
AYN RAND
SOURCE: THE RETURN OF THE PRIMITIVE: THE ANTI-INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
“We are one…alone…and only…and we love you who are one…alone…and only. We looked into each other’s eyes and we knew the breath of a miracle had touched us, and fled, and left us groping vainly. And we felt torn, torn for some word we could not find.”
AYN RAND
SOURCE: ANTHEM
“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.”
AYN RAND
SOURCE: THE AYN RAND LEXICON: OBJECTIVISM FROM A TO Z
SOURCE: THE FOUNTAINHEAD
Hopefully, this collection of Ayn Rand quotes offers you exciting perspectives to reflect on. She was a fantastic novelist-philosopher who outlined a comprehensive philosophy, including an epistemology and art theory. Her words will live on in our minds.
If you liked reading these Ayn Rand quotes then you can also check out these 35 Frederick Douglass Quotes About Freedom, Education, Slavery & More!
