These are some of Ayn Rand’s most powerful quotes.

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

“I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle.”

“A mixed economy has to reach the day when it faces a final crossroad: either the private sector regains its freedom and starts rebuilding—or it gives up and lets the absolute state take over the shambles.”

“Serenity comes from the ability to say ‘Yes’ to existence. Courage comes from the ability to say ‘No’ to the wrong choices made by others.”

“The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.”

“The power that determines the establishment, the changes, the evolution, and the destruction of social systems is philosophy. The role of chance, accident, or tradition, in this context, is the same as their role in the life of the individual: their power stands in inverse ratio to the power of a culture’s (or an individual’s) philosophical equipment, and grows as philosophy collapses.”

“A culture is made—or destroyed—by its articulate voices.”

“Ideas cannot be fought except by means of better ideas. The battle consists, not of opposing, but of exposing; not of denouncing, but of disproving; not of evading, but of boldly proclaiming a full, consistent and radical alternative.”

“If, before undertaking some action, you must obtain the permission of society—you are not free, whether such permission is granted to you or not. Only a slave acts on permission. A permission is not a right.”

“Just as man’s physical existence was liberated when he grasped the principle that ‘nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed,’ so his consciousness will be liberated when he grasps that nature, to be apprehended, must be obeyed—that the rules of cognition must be derived from the nature of existence and the nature, the identity, of his cognitive faculty.”

“What subjectivism is in the realm of ethics, collectivism is in the realm of politics. Just as the notion that ‘Anything I do is right because I chose to do it,’ is not a moral principle, but a negation of morality—so the notion that ‘Anything society does is right because society chose to do it,’ is not a moral principle, but a negation of moral principles and the banishment of morality from social issues.”

“There is nothing so naive as cynicism.”

“Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries.”

“Why is the word ‘virtue’ used as a synonym for ‘strength’ or ‘efficacy’? There is here the same connection as between ‘right’ used for ‘true to facts’ and for ‘morally correct.’ Obviously, the conceptions of morals and virtues were [meant] to be practical—not the complete opposite of practice. Altruism made them this last.”

“It is this context-from the perspective of the bloody millennia of mankind‘s history-that I want you to look at the birth of a miracle: the United States of America. If it is never ever proper for men to kneel, we should kneel when we read the Declaration of Independence.”

“The demand to ‘restrict’ technology is the demand to restrict man’s mind. It is nature—i.e., reality—that makes both these goals impossible to achieve. Technology can be destroyed, and the mind can be paralyzed, but neither can be restricted. Whether and wherever such restrictions are attempted, it is the mind—not the state—that withers away.”

“There can be no compromise between freedom and government controls; to accept ‘just a few controls’ is to surrender the principle of inalienable individual rights and to substitute for it the principle of the government’s unlimited, arbitrary power, thus delivering oneself into gradual enslavement.”

“A blind follower is precisely what my philosophy condemns and what I reject. Objectivism is not a mystic cult.”

“How rare a virtue intellectual integrity (i.e., the non-evasion of reality) actually is.”

“To love the ideal and also those who betray it, is only to betray the ideal.”

“To love is to value. Only a rationally selfish man, a man of self-esteem, is capable of love—because he is the only man capable of holding firm, consistent, uncompromising, unbetrayed values. The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone.”

“The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world.”

“All the reasons which make the initiation of physical force an evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative.”

“The machine, the frozen form of a living intelligence, is the power that expands the potential of your life by raising the productivity of your time.”

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

“Whoever, to whatever purpose or extent, initiates the use of force, is a killer acting on the premise of death in a manner wider than murder: the premise of destroying man’s capacity to live.”

“A body without a soul is a corpse, a soul without a body is a ghost.”

“The man of talent is always more severe with his own writing than any outside critic could ever be.”

“There is no honest revolt against reason—and when you accept any part of their creed, your motive is to get away with something your reason would not permit you to attempt.”

“When you write an article in which you evaluate cultural phenomena rationally, you do more for Objectivism than you could in any other form.”

“A thinking child cannot conform—thought does not bow to authority. The resentment of the pack toward intelligence and independence is older than Progressive education; it is an ancient evil (among children and adults alike), a product of fear, self-doubt and envy.”

“Observe also the intensity, the austere, the unsmiling seriousness with which an infant watches the world around him. (If you ever find, in an adult, that degree of seriousness about reality, you will have found a great man.)”

“Government control of a country’s economy—any kind or degree of such control, by any group, for any purpose whatsoever—rests on the basic principle of statism, the principle that man’s life belongs to the state.”

“The government was set to protect man from criminals—and the Constitution was written to protect man from the government.”

“[R]eligion breaks a character before it’s formed, in childhood, by teaching a child lies before he knows what a lie is, by breaking him of the habit of thinking before he has begun to think, by making him a hypocrite before he knows any other possible attitude toward life.”

“What objectivity and the study of philosophy require is not an ‘open mind,’ but an active mind.”

“[A] concession to the irrational invalidates one’s consciousness and turns it from the task of perceiving to the task of faking reality.”

“The three most important elements in fiction are plot, plot, and plot. The equivalent in nonfiction is: clarity, clarity, and clarity.”

“All philosophical con games count on your using words as vague approximations.”

“Whoever claims the “right” to “redistribute” the wealth produced by others is claiming the “right” to treat human beings as chattel.”

“The only cardinal sin is the denial or suspension of one’s reason—the refusal to face reality, identify it and make rational connections.”

“The more propaganda . . . conservatives spread for capitalist economics while at the same time preaching collectivism morally and philosophically, the more nails they’ll drive into capitalism’s coffin.”

“Honesty is not a social duty, not a sacrifice for the sake of others, but the most profoundly selfish virtue man can practice: his refusal to sacrifice the reality of his own existence to the deluded consciousness of others.”

“Intellectual honesty consists in taking ideas seriously. To take ideas seriously means that you intend to live by, to practice, any idea you accept as true.”

“Only a man of integrity can possess the virtue of honesty, since only the faking of one’s consciousness can permit the faking of existence.”

“The virtue involved in helping those one loves is not ‘selflessness’ or ‘sacrifice,’ but integrity. Integrity is loyalty to one’s convictions and values; it is the policy of acting in accordance with one’s values, of expressing, upholding and translating them into practical reality.”

“Since knowledge, thinking, and rational action are properties of the individual, since the choice to exercise his rational faculty or not depends on the individual, man’s survival requires that those who think be free of the interference of those who don’t.”

“Thought does not bow to authority.”

“[It is] monstrous ever to confront a child with the slightest suggestion of the irrational.”

“In moral and intellectual issues, it is not enough to be right: one has to know that one is right.”

“One does not and cannot ‘negotiate’ with brutality, nor give it the benefit of the doubt. The moral absolute should be: if and when, in any dispute, one side initiates the use of physical force, that side is wrong—and no consideration or discussion of the issues is necessary or appropriate.”

“If a mother buys food for her hungry child rather than a hat for herself, it is not a sacrifice: she values the child higher than the hat; but it is a sacrifice to the kind of mother whose higher value is the hat, who would prefer her child to starve and feeds him only from a sense of duty. If a man dies fighting for his own freedom, it is not a sacrifice: he is not willing to live as a slave; but it is a sacrifice to the kind of man who’s willing. If a man refuses to sell his convictions, it is not a sacrifice, unless he is the sort of man who has no convictions. “

“There is nothing so naive as cynicism.”

“I’m not brave enough to be a coward; I see the consequences too clearly.”

“When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit.”

“Joy is the goal of existence, and joy is not to be stumbled upon, but to be achieved, and the act of treason is to let its vision drown in the swamp of the moment’s torture.”

“Philosophy is the goal toward which religion was only a helplessly blind groping. The grandeur, the reverence, the exalted purity, the austere dedication to the pursuit of truth, which are commonly associated with religion, should properly belong to the field of philosophy.”

“Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think.”

“The argument from intimidation is a confession of intellectual impotence.”

“The most selfish of all things is the independent mind that recognizes no authority higher than its own and no value higher than its judgment of truth.”

“[T]he free market is not ruled by the intellectual criteria of the majority, which prevail only at and for any given moment; the free market is ruled by those who are able to see and plan long-range—and the better the mind, the longer the range.”

“Man’s senses are his only direct cognitive contact with reality and, therefore, his only source of information. Without sensory evidence, there can be no concepts; without concepts, there can be no language; without language, there can be no knowledge and no science.”

“No social system can stand for long without a moral base. Project a magnificent skyscraper being built on quicksands: while men are struggling upward to add the hundredth and two-hundredth stories, the tenth and twentieth are vanishing, sucked under by the muck. That is the history of capitalism, of its swaying, tottering attempt to stand erect on the foundation of the altruist morality.”

“To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one’s thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one’s mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.”

“An error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error.”

“The sacrifice of material goods is only the last, and superficial, result of altruism. The basic demand of altruism is the sacrifice of one’s mind.”

“A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race—and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin.”

[I]f a carnivorous pack attacks them, animals perish—man writes the Constitution of the United States.

“When men give up reason and freedom, the vacuum is filled by faith and force.”

“When opposite basic principles are clearly and openly defined, it works to the advantage of the rational side.”

“Defiance, not obedience, is the American’s answer to overbearing authority.”

“The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by precedent, by implication, by erosion, by default, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other—until the day when they are suddenly declared to be the country’s official ideology.”

“The most selfish of all things is the independent mind that recognizes no authority higher than its own and no value higher than its judgment of truth.”

“The root of the whole modern disaster is philosophical and moral. People are not embracing collectivism because they have accepted bad economics. They are accepting bad economics because they have embraced collectivism.”

“No one’s rights can be secured by the violation of the rights of others.”

“Love and friendship are profoundly personal, selfish values: 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. A ‘selfless,’ ‘disinterested’ love is a contradiction in terms: it means that one is indifferent to that which one values.”

“I am, therefore I’ll think.”

“[A]ll work is creative work if done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine he has learned from others.”

“Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy.”

“Integrity does not require martyrdom; but it does forbid compromise.”

“Integrity does not consist of loyalty to one’s subjective whims, but of loyalty to rational principles.”

“Reason and morality are the only weapons that determine the course of history. The collectivists dropped them because they had no right to carry them. Pick them up: you have.”

“You propose to establish a social order based on the following tenets: that you’re incompetent to run your own life, but competent to run the lives of others—that you’re unfit to exist in freedom, but fit to become an omnipotent ruler—that you’re unable to earn your living by the use of your own intelligence, but able to judge politicians and to vote them into jobs of total power over arts you have never seen, over sciences you have never studied, over achievements of which you have no knowledge, over the gigantic industries where you, by your own definition of your capacity, would be unable successfully to fill the job of assistant greaser.”

“Dropping below the level of a savage, who believes that the magic words he utters have the power to alter reality, they believe that reality can be altered by the power of the words they do not utter—and their magic tool is the blank-out, the pretense that nothing can come into existence past the voodoo of their refusal to identify it.”

“Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.”

“To withhold your contempt from men’s vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement.”

“Everything we do and are proceeds from our mind.”

“Honor is self-esteem made visible in action.”

“A mystic is a man who surrendered his mind at its first encounter with the minds of others. Somewhere in the distant reaches of his childhood, when his own understanding of reality clashed with the assertions of others, with their arbitrary orders and contradictory demands, he gave in to so craven a fear of independence that he renounced his rational faculty. At the crossroads of the choice between ‘I know’ and ‘They say,’ he chose the authority of others, he chose to submit rather than to understand, to believe rather than to think. Faith in the supernatural begins as faith in the superiority of others. His surrender took the form of the feeling that he must hide his lack of understanding, that others possess some mysterious knowledge of which he alone is deprived, that reality is whatever they want it to be, through some means forever denied to him.”

“Devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality; there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.”

“There has never been a philosophy, a theory or a doctrine that attacked (or ‘limited’) reason, which did not also preach submission to the power of some authority.”

“Competition is a by-product of productive work, not its goal. A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.”

“Do not unite ‘economic power’ and ‘political power’ into a single, meaningless package-deal labelled: ‘power.’ The power of production is not the same thing as the power of coercion.”

“The most crucial aspect of egoism is the sovereignty of one’s own rational judgment and the right to live by its guidance.”

“For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbors—between those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it.”

“No one’s welfare can be achieved by anyone’s sacrifice.”

“All work is creative work if done by a thinking mind.”

“Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration.”

“The intellectuals, most of whom are leftist, have been struggling to achieve a spatial situation which is geometrically impossible: a political field consisting of a middle and a left-of-middle, with no right-of-middle. They came close to succeeding. Their success was made possible by the non-philosophical attitude of most rightists, who surrendered the intellect to the leftists, accepted their basic premises, and mouthed empty slogans in answer to deadly political principles.”

“It is not justice or equal treatment that you grant to men when you abstain equally from praising men’s virtues and from condemning men’s vices. When your impartial attitude declares, in effect, that neither the good nor the evil may expect anything from you—whom do you betray and whom do you encourage?”

“Courage is the practical form of being true to existence, of being true to truth, and confidence is the practical form of being true to one’s own consciousness.”

“The basic premise of the Founding Fathers was man’s right to his own life, to his own liberty, to the pursuit of his own happiness—which means: man’s right to exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; and that the political implementation of this right is a society where men deal with one another as traders, by voluntary exchange to mutual benefit.”

“Man’s mind is his basic means of survival—and of self-protection. Reason is the most selfish human faculty: it has to be used in and by a man’s own mind, and its product—truth—makes him inflexible, intransigent, impervious to the power of any pack or any ruler.”

“Thanksgiving is a typically American holiday. In spite of its religious form (giving thanks to God for a good harvest), its essential, secular meaning is a celebration of successful production. It is a producers’ holiday. The lavish meal is a symbol of the fact that abundant consumption is the result and reward of production. Abundance is (or was and ought to be) America’s pride—just as it is the pride of American parents that their children need never know starvation.”