The Philosopher

Ayn Rand

The face

The background

Nationality:
Russian-American
Schools:
Objectivism, Romantic realism
Period:
20th century

The synopsis

Alice O'Connor (born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum; January 20, 1905 – March 6, 1982), better known by her pen name Ayn Rand, was a Russian-American writer and philosopher. She is known for her fiction and for developing a philosophical system which she named Objectivism. Born and educated in Russia, she moved to the United States in 1926. After two early novels that were initially unsuccessful and two Broadway plays, Rand achieved fame with her 1943 novel The Fountainhead. In 1957, she published her best-selling work, the novel Atlas Shrugged. Afterward, until her death in 1982, she turned to non-fiction to promote her philosophy, publishing her own periodicals and releasing several collections of essays. Rand advocated reason and rejected faith and religion. She supported rational and ethical egoism as opposed to altruism and hedonism. In politics, she condemned the initiation of force as immoral and supported laissez-faire capitalism, which she defined as the system based on recognizing individual rights, including private property rights. Although she opposed libertarianism, which she viewed as anarchism, Rand is often associated with the modern libertarian movement in the United States. In art, she promoted romantic realism. She was sharply critical of most philosophers and philosophical traditions known to her, with a few exceptions. Rand's books have sold over 37 million copies. Her fiction received mixed reviews from literary critics, with reviews becoming more negative for her later work. Although academic interest in her ideas has grown since her death, academic philosophers have generally ignored or rejected Rand's philosophy, arguing that she has a polemical approach and that her work lacks methodological rigor. Her writings have politically influenced some right-libertarians and conservatives, although she also criticized them. The Objectivist movement circulates her ideas, both to the public and in academic settings.

The works

The quotes

The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me.
Ayn Rand
It only stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.
Ayn Rand
Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.
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
Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.
Ayn Rand
Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision.
Ayn Rand
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.
Ayn Rand
Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth, the man who would make his fortune no matter where he started.
Ayn Rand
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.
Ayn Rand
The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap.
Ayn Rand
When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is learning to understand and control the behavior of crop plants and domestic animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized.
Ayn Rand
Potentially, a government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.
Ayn Rand
A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.
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
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.
Ayn Rand
The truth is not for all men, but only for those who seek it.
Ayn Rand
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
If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.
Ayn Rand
The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
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
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
Rights are not a matter of numbers - and there can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob.
Ayn Rand
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
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.
Ayn Rand
To achieve, you need thought. You have to know what you are doing and that's real power.
Ayn Rand
Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future.
Ayn Rand
When I die, I hope to go to Heaven, whatever the Hell that is.
Ayn Rand
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.
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
Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone.
Ayn Rand
There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.
Ayn Rand
Man's unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself.
Ayn Rand