A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.
Ayn Rand

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

A desire presupposes the possibility of action to achieve it; action presupposes a goal which is worth achieving.
Ayn Rand

Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values.
Ayn Rand

Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.
Ayn Rand

Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting for us in our graves - or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.
Ayn Rand

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.
Ayn Rand

Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.
Ayn Rand

Do not ever say that the desire to "do good" by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.
Ayn Rand

Every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics - a rational ethics - as a precondition of rebirth.
Ayn Rand


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

Evil requires the sanction of the victim.
Ayn Rand

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

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.
Ayn Rand

God... a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive.
Ayn Rand

Government "help" to business is just as disastrous as government persecution... the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off.
Ayn Rand

Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values.
Ayn Rand

I don't build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.
Ayn Rand

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

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