Ayn Rand

Literary Birthday – 2 February – Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand was born 2 February 1905, and died 6 March 1982.

The Top 10 Ayn Rand Quotes

  1. The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.
  2. 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.
  3. We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality.
  4. The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
  5. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists, it is real, it is possible, it’s yours.
  6. A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.
  7. Upper classes are a nation’s past; the middle class is its future.
  8. A man’s sexual choice is the result and the sum of his fundamental convictions…. He will always be attracted to the woman who reflects his deepest vision of himself, the woman whose surrender permits him to experience a sense of self-esteem. The man who is proudly certain of his own value, will want the highest type of woman he can find, the woman he admires, the strongest, the hardest to conquer—because only the possession of a heroine will give him the sense of an achievement.
  9. Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?
  10. You have been the one encounter in my life that can never be repeated.

Ayn Rand was a Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter. She is known for her two best-selling novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas ShruggedAfter their success, Rand spent her time lecturing and writing on Objectivism, which she described as the philosophy for living on earth. None of her books have ever been out of print.

Source for Image: English: Photo portrait credited to “Talbot” (though not on original dust jacket). Published by the Bobbs-Merrill Company., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson

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Posted on: 2nd February 2013
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