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Date of Birth
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02-February-1905
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Place of Birth
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Saint Petersburg
(Russia, Northwestern Federal District)
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Nationality
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United States of America, Russia, Soviet Union
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Also know as
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Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum, Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, Alisha Rosenbaum, ayn_rand, Rand, Ayn
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Profession
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Novelist, Screenwriter, Playwright, Philosopher
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Quotes
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- I am leaving it as I found it. Take over. It's yours.
- Senor d'Anconia said that you bore him, Mr. Taggart.
- I don't build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.
- Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision.
- Upper classes are a nation's past, the middle class its future.
- What is a demanding pleasure that demands the use of ones mind! Not in the sense of problem solving, but in the sense of exercising discrimination, judgment, awareness.
- Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.
- Every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics -- a rational ethics -- as a precondition of rebirth.
- A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.
- To achieve, you need thought. You have to know what you are doing and that's real power.
- There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.
- Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think.
- Love is an expression and assertion of self-esteem, a response to one's own values in the person of another. One gains a profoundly personal, selfish joy from the mere existence of the person one loves. It is one's own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns, and derives from love.
- The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.
- The common good of a collective -- a race, a class, a state -- was the claim and justification of every tyranny ever established over men. Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equaled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism? Does the fault lie in men's hypocrisy or in the nature of the principle? The most dreadful butchers were the most sincere. The believed in the perfect society reached through the guillotine and the firing squad. Nobody questioned their right to murder since they were murdering for an altruistic purpose. It was accepted that man must be sacrificed for other men. Actors change, but the course of the tragedy remains the same. A humanitarian who starts with the declarations of love for mankind and ends with a sea of blood. It goes on and will go on so long as men believe that an action is good if it is unselfish. That permits the altruist to act and forces his victims to bear it. The leaders of collectivist movements ask nothing of themselves. But observe the results.
- Who is John Galt?
- 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.
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Ayn Rand was an American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter. She is known for her two best-selling novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and for developing a philosophical system she called Objectivism. Born and educated in Russia, Rand moved to the United States in 1926. She had a play produced on Broadway in 1935–1936. After two early novels that were initially unsuccessful in America, she achieved fame with her 1943 novel, The Fountainhead.
In 1957, she published her best-known work, the novel Atlas Shrugged. Afterward, she turned to non-fiction to promote her philosophy, publishing her own magazines and releasing several collections of essays until her death in 1982. Rand advocated reason as the only means of acquiring knowledge and rejected faith and religion. She supported rational and ethical egoism, and rejected ethical altruism. In politics, she condemned the initiation of force as immoral and opposed collectivism and statism as well as anarchism, instead supporting a minarchist limited government and laissez-faire capitalism, which she believed to be the only social system that protected individual rights. In art, Rand promoted romantic realism. She was sharply critical of most philosophers and philosophical traditions known to her, except for some Aristotelians and classical liberals.
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