Place nothing above the verdict of your own mind. — Ayn Rand

We are born into this world unarmed–our mind is our only weapon. — Ayn Rand

Man’s mind is his basic tool of survival. — Ayn Rand

An inventor is a man who asks ‘Why?’ of the universe and lets nothing stand between the answer and his mind. — Ayn Rand

If any part of your uncertainty is a conflict between your heart and your mind–follow your mind. — Ayn Rand

The mind is the attribute of man. When man is born, he comes into existence with only one weapon with him––The reasoning mind. — Ayn Rand

Words are a lens to focus one’s mind. — Ayn Rand

Self–esteem is reliance on one’s power to think… The man of authentic self–confidence is the man who relies on the judgment of his own mind. — Ayn Rand

He had to say; words were a lens to focus one’s mind, and he could not use words for anything else tonight. — Ayn Rand

Power–lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind. — Ayn Rand

Do not lose your knowledge that man’s proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind, and a step that travels unlimited roads. — Ayn Rand

Through the dry phases of calculations in her mind, she noticed that she did have time to feel something: it was the hard, exhilarating pleasure of action. — Ayn Rand

She’s a writer. The kind of writer who wouldn’t be published outside. She believes that when one deals with words, one deals with the mind. — Ayn Rand

All work is creative work if done by a thinking mind. — Ayn Rand

How did you do it? How did you manage to remain unmangled?’ ‘By holding on to just one rule.’ ‘Which?’ ‘To place nothing–nothing–above the verdict of my own mind. — Ayn Rand

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

He walked, groping for a sentence that hung in his mind as an empty shape. He could neither fill it or dismiss it. — Ayn Rand

For they have nothing to fight me with, save the brute force of their numbers. I have my mind. — Ayn Rand

There is only one source of authentic self–confidence: reason. — Ayn Rand

Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it — Ayn Rand

Reason accepts no commandments. — Ayn Rand

Ever since Kant divorced reason from reality, his intellectual descendants have been diligently widening the breach. — Ayn Rand

Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man’s only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth. — Ayn Rand

Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men’s stupidity, but your talent to their reason. — Ayn Rand

I am an intransigent atheist, though not a militant one. This means that I am not fighting against religion–I am fighting for reason. — Ayn Rand

A thing is not high if one can reach it; it is not great if one can reason it; it is not deep if one can see its bottom. — Ayn Rand

If men are to be ruled, then the enemy is reason. — Ayn Rand

My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists–and in a single choice: to live. — Ayn Rand

People said it because other people said it. They did not know why it was being said and heard everywhere. they did not give or ask for reasons. — Ayn Rand

Aquinas brought an Aristotelian view of reason back into European culture, and lighted the way toward the Renaissance. — Ayn Rand

What is greatness? I will answer: it is the capacity to live by the three fundamental values of John Galt: reason, purpose, self–esteem. — Ayn Rand

The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments. — Ayn Rand

All the reasons which made the initiation of physical force evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative. — Ayn Rand

To rest one’s case on faith means To concede that reason is on the side of one’s enemies–that one has no rational arguments To offer. — Ayn Rand

I see man as a hero. With his own happiness as his moral obligation; productive achievementbas his noblest activity and reason as the only absolute. — Ayn Rand

Men who reject the responsibility of thought and reason can only exist as parasites on the thinking of others. — Ayn Rand

It stands to reason that if sacrifices are being given, somebody is collecting sacrifices. — Ayn Rand

If one doesn’t respect oneself one can have neither love nor respect for others. — Ayn Rand

You love only those who deserve it. — Ayn Rand

To say ‘I love you’ one must first be able to say the ‘I.’ — Ayn Rand

You must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the secondary consequences. — Ayn Rand

Your fear of death is not a love for life. . . — Ayn Rand

Only the man who extols the purity of love devoid of desire, is capable of the depravity of a desire devoid of love. — Ayn Rand

You love people, not for what you do for them or what they do for you. You love them for their values; their virtues. — Ayn Rand

It is one’s own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns, and derives from love. — Ayn Rand

You don’t love causes. You don’t love everybody indiscriminately. You love only those who deserve it. — Ayn Rand

The virtue involved in helping those one loves is not ‘selflessness’ or ‘sacrifice,’ but integrity. — Ayn Rand

There is no affirmation without the one who affirms. in this sense, everything to which you grant your love is yours — Ayn Rand

They professed to love him for some unknown reason and they ignored all the things for which he could wish to be loved. — Ayn Rand

Love is our response to our highest values. — Ayn Rand

I love doing it. Every building is like a person. Single and unrepeatable. — Ayn Rand

I am the man who loves his life. I am the man who does not sacrifice his love or his values. — Ayn Rand

She was incapable of love for any object not of her own choice and she resented anyone’s demand for it. — Ayn Rand

But you see, the measure of hell you’re able to endure is the measure of your love. — Ayn Rand

One can’t love man without hating most of the creatures who pretend to bear his name. — Ayn Rand

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

If you know that this life is all that you have, wouldn’t you make the most of it? — Ayn Rand

A moment or an eternity–did it matter? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist. — Ayn Rand

To a life; which is reason unto itself. — Ayn Rand

The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. — Ayn Rand

Neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. — Ayn Rand

I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of my life. — Ayn Rand

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

Life is the reward of virtue. And happiness is the goal and reward of life. — Ayn Rand

That which is not worth contemplating in life, is not worth recreating in art. — Ayn Rand

The worst guilt is to accept an undeserved guilt–and that is what you have been doing all your life. — Ayn Rand

All life is a purposeful struggle, and your only choice is the choice of a goal. — Ayn Rand

It is not death that we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to live. — Ayn Rand

Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life. — Ayn Rand

We are on strike against the doctrine that life is guilt. — Ayn Rand

Man cannot demand that others give up their lives to make him happy. — Ayn Rand

Life is a value to be bought and thinking is the only coin noble enough to buy it. — Ayn Rand

Don’t ever give up what you want in life. The struggle is worth it. — Ayn Rand

Whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man’s nature and of life’s potential. — Ayn Rand

Kant is the most evil man in mankind’s history. — Ayn Rand

There can be no justification for choosing any part of that which one knows to be evil. — Ayn Rand

In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. — Ayn Rand

I am unwilling to be wholly good–and please don’t regard me as wholly evil! — Ayn Rand

A viler evil than to murder a man, is to sell him suicide as an act of virtue. — Ayn Rand

Degrees do not matter… one does not bargain about inches of evil. — Ayn Rand

Evil requires the sanction of the victim. — Ayn Rand

To discuss evil in a manner implying neutrality, is to sanction it. — Ayn Rand

There are no evil thoughts except one; the refusal to think. — Ayn Rand

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

There are no evil thoughts, Mr. Rearden,’ Francisco said softly, ‘except one: the refusal to think. — Ayn Rand

I consider promiscuity immoral. Not because sex is evil, but because sex is too good and too important. — Ayn Rand

In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. — Ayn Rand

The truly and deliberately evil men are a very small minority; it is the appeaser who unleashes them on mankind. — Ayn Rand

The worst evil that you can do, psychologically, is to laugh at yourself. That means spitting in your own face. — Ayn Rand

Why yes, I can,’ said Midas Mulligan, when he was asked whether he could name a person more evil than the man with a heart closed to pity. ‘The man who uses another’s pity for him as a weapon. — Ayn Rand

To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. That is freedom. That and nothing else. — Ayn Rand

A free mind and a free market are corollaries. — Ayn Rand

Political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries. — Ayn Rand

If a society is to be free, its government has to be controlled. — Ayn Rand

Man is a being with free will; therefore, each man is potentially good or evil, and it’s up to him and only him (through his reasoning mind) to decide which he wants to be. — Ayn Rand

We are fast approaching the stage of ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission. — Ayn Rand

Statism needs war; a free country does not. Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by producing. — Ayn Rand

But what is freedom? Freedom from what? There is nothing to take a man’s freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. That is freedom. That and nothing else. — Ayn Rand

As long as men are free to speak, a small, rational minority will always prevail over an irrational majority. — Ayn Rand

Ideas, in a free society, are not a crime–and neither can they serve as the justification of a crime. — Ayn Rand

In a fully free society, taxation–or, to be exact, payment for governmental services–would be voluntary. — Ayn Rand

In a free society, one does not have to deal with those who are irrational. One is free to avoid them. — Ayn Rand

The concept of free competition enforced by law is a grotesque contradiction in terms. — Ayn Rand

Every man is free to rise as far as he’s able or willing, but the degree to which he thinks determines the degree to which he’ll rise. — Ayn Rand

There are no little people in America. There are only people, equal before the law, yearning to breathe free and wanting to achieve the best within them. — Ayn Rand

Happiness is self–contained and self–sufficient. Happy men have no time and no use for you. Happy men are free men. — Ayn Rand

Morality pertains only to the sphere of man’s free will–only to those actions which are open to his choice. — Ayn Rand

All depressions are caused by government interference and the cure is always offered to take more of the poison that caused the disaster. Depressions are not the result of a free economy. — Ayn Rand

It is a free market that makes monopolies impossible. — Ayn Rand

Freedom (n.): To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing. — Ayn Rand

The genius must have his freedom and his independence. — Ayn Rand

The degree of a country’s freedom is the degree of its prosperity. — Ayn Rand

I take the only desire one can really permit oneself. Freedom, Alvah, freedom. . .To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing. — Ayn Rand

Freedom of association includes the freedom not to associate. — Ayn Rand

There is nothing to take a man’s freedom away from him, save other men (pg. 101). — Ayn Rand

Believing in fate produces fate. Believing in freedom will create infinite possibilities. — Ayn Rand

I guard my treasures: my thought, my will, my freedom. And the greatest of these is freedom. — Ayn Rand

Freedom comes from seeing the ignorance of your critics and discovering the emptiness of their virtue. — Ayn Rand

I recognize no obligations toward men except one: to respect their freedom and to take no part in a slave society. — Ayn Rand

Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade… — Ayn Rand

What is the basic, the essential, the crucial principle that differentiates freedom from slavery? It is the principle of voluntary action versus physical coercion or compulsion. — Ayn Rand