Ayn Rand Mind Quotations

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.

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

The basic need of the creator is independence. The reasoning mind cannot work under any form of compulsion. It cannot be curbed, sacrificed or subordinated to any consideration whatsoever. It demands total independence in function and in motive.

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

We are born into this world unarmed - our mind is our only weapon.

Words are a lens to focus one's mind.

Man's mind is his basic tool of survival.

A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort, or enslaves him, or attempts to limit the freedom of his mind, or compels him to act against his own rational judgment-a society that sets up a conflict between its edicts and the requirements of man’s nature—is not, strictly speaking, a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang-rule.

The Middle Ages were an era of mysticism, ruled by blind faith and blind obedience to the dogma that faith is superior to reason. The Renaissance was specifically the rebirth of reason, the liberation of man's mind, the triumph of rationality over mysticism - a faltering, incomplete, but impassioned triumph that led to the birth of science, of individualism, of freedom.

John Galt is Prometheus who changed his mind. After centuries of being torn by vultures in payment for having brought to men the fire of the gods, he broke his chains—and he withdrew his fire—until the day when men withdraw their vultures.

The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind

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.

Married people dont look like they have bedrooms on their minds when they look at each other. In this world, either you're virtuous or you enjoy yourself. Not both...Not both.

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.

The action required to sustain human life is primarily intellectual; everything man needs has to be discovered by his mind and produced by his effort.

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.

A free mind and a free market are corollaries.

Capitalism was the only system in history where wealth was not acquired by looting, but by production, not by force, but by trade, the only system that stood for man's right to his own mind, to his work, to his life, to his happiness, to himself.

In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that man’s proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads.

Just as there is no such thing as a collective or racial mind, so there is no such thing as a collective or racial achievement. There are only individual minds and individual achievements-an d a culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiate d masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.

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

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.

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

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

Do not open your mouth to tell me that your mind has convinced you of your right to force my mind. Force and mind are opposites. Morality ends where a gun begins.

When one turns from reason to faith, when one rejects the absolutism of reality, one undercuts the absolutism of one's consciousness - and one's mind becomes an organ one cannot trust any longer. It becomes what the mystics claim it to be: a tool of distortion.

Emotions are inherent in your nature, but their content is dictated by your mind. Your emotional capacity is an empty motor, and your values are the fuel with which your mind fills it.

Place nothing above the verdict of your own mind.

Your emotional capacity is an empty motor, and your values are the fuel with which your mind fills it. If you choose a mix of contradictions, it will clog your motor, corrode your transmission and wreck you on your first attempt to move with a machine which you, the driver, have corrupted.

Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own - they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal - for a mind to respect and an achievement to admire.

The right to agree with others is not a problem in any society; it is the right to disagree that is crucial. It is the institution of private property that protects and implements the right to disagree - and thus keeps the road open to man's most valuable attribute: the creative mind.

If any part of your uncertainty, is a conflict between your heart and your mind - follow your mind.