38 Remarkable Ayn Rand Quotes on Individual Free Enterprise

Ayn Rand was an early pioneer in the personal development movement. She advocates that individuals follow their dreams and choose freedom over tyranny, where you seek what really lights you up.

Her most highly regarded books spoke of Objectivism whereby we prioritize our achievements and happiness. Essentially, this was a reference as “a philosophy for living on earth” despite its complexity.

While the books may be complex to read, these quotes on philosophy will give you some simpler insights.

1. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

Ayn Rand

2. Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.

Ayn Rand

3. The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone.

Ayn Rand

4. The most depraved type of human being is the man without a purpose.

Ayn Rand

5. Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.

Ayn Rand

6. I never found beauty in longing for the impossible and never found the possible to be beyond my reach.

Ayn Rand

7. When I die I hope to go to heaven–whatever that is–and I want to be able to afford the price of admission.

Ayn Rand

8. 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

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

Ayn Rand

10. 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

11. I regret nothing. There have been things I missed, but I ask no questions, because I have loved it, such as it has been, even the moments of emptiness, even the unanswered-and that I loved it, that is the unanswered in my life.

Ayn Rand

12. Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. But, in fact, a person’s sexual choice is the result and sum of their fundamental convictions. Tell me what a person finds sexually attractive and I will tell you their entire philosophy of life.

Ayn Rand

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

Ayn Rand

14. We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality

Ayn Rand

15. There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.

Ayn Rand

16. Never think of pain or danger or enemies a moment longer than is necessary to fight them.

Ayn Rand

17. My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose.

Ayn Rand

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

Ayn Rand

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

Ayn Rand

20. The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see.

Ayn Rand

21. One loses everything when one loses one’s sense of humor.

Ayn Rand

22. The truth is not for all men but only for those who seek it.

Ayn Rand

23. Why do they always teach us that it’s easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It’s the hardest thing in the world–to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want.

Ayn Rand

24. Love is the expression of one’s values.

Ayn Rand

25. Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone.

Ayn Rand

26. Any alleged right of one man, which necessitates the violation of the rights of another isn’t and can’t be a right.

Ayn Rand

27. It is not advisable to venture unsolicited opinions. You should spare yourself the embarrassing discovery of their exact value to your listener.

Ayn Rand

28. The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap.

Ayn Rand

29. But why should you care what people will say? All you have to do is please yourself.

Ayn Rand

30. The worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt.

Ayn Rand

31. Love should be treated like a business deal, but every business deal has its own terms and its own currency. And in love, the currency is virtue. You love people not for what you do for them or what they do for you. You love them for the values, the virtues, which they have achieved in their own character.

Ayn Rand

32. The businessman’s tool is value.

Ayn Rand

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

Ayn Rand

34. 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.

Ayn Rand

35. When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit.

Ayn Rand

36. I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle.

Ayn Rand

37. She did not know the nature of her loneliness. The only words that named it were: This is not the world I expected.

Ayn Rand

38. The great creators — the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors — stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new thought was opposed. Every great new invention was denounced. The first motor was considered foolish. The airplane was considered impossible. The power loom was considered vicious. Anesthesia was considered sinful. But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered and they paid. But they won.

Ayn Rand