Ayn Rand’s Most Insightful Quotes on Rights, Individualism, and Government

Integrity is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your consciousness, just as honesty is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake existence.

The virtue involved in helping those one loves is not 'selflessness' or 'sacrifice,' but integrity.

Rationalization is a process of not perceiving reality, but of attempting to make reality fit one’s emotions.

If one's actions are honest, one does not need the predated confidence of others.

No happy person can be quite so impervious to pain.

Rationality is the recognition of the fact that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it.

Writing is serious business and not for any stray bastard that wants to try it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

An attempt to achieve the good by force is like an attempt to provide a man with a picture gallery at the price of cutting out his eyes.

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

What is man? He's just a collection of chemicals with delusions of grandeur

Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea.

Love is our response to our highest values, and can be nothing else

In order to deal with reality successfully - to pursue and achieve the values which his life requires - man needs self-esteem; he needs to be confident of his efficacy and worth.

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

The measure of hell you're able to endure is the measure of your love.