Ayn Rand Quotes

I think a lot of people have lost respect for the individual, you know, the individual, the person who doesn't conform.

Conformities are called for much more eagerly today than yesterday... skeptics, liberals, individuals with a taste for private life and their own inner standards of behavior, are objects of fear and derision and targets of persecution for either side... in the great ideological wars of our time.

Although we think that we think, most of the time we are being thought by the collective mind, the hypnosis of conditioning.

To be an individual is the hardest thing in the world, because nobody likes you to be an individual. Everybody wants to kill your individuality and to make a sheep out of you. Nobody wants you to be on your own.

Individualism is going around these days in uniform, handing out the party line on individualism.

Whoever regards human beings as a herd and flees them as swiftly as he can will no doubt be overtaken by them and impaled on theirhorns.

Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself.

Liberalism is the transformation of mankind into cattle.

I always went my own road and on my own legs where I had a mind to go.

The person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton, identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious any more. But the price he pays, however, is high; it is the loss of his self.

Aesthetes never do anything but what they are told.

Or about how when you're a child, to stop you from following the crowd you're assaulted with the line "If everyone jumped off a bridge, would you?" but when you're an adult and to be different is suddenly a crime, people seem to be saying, "Hey. Everyone else is jumping off a bridge. Why aren't you?

Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all be pure

Weak minds think alike.

Gregariousness is always the refuge of mediocrities, whether they swear by Soloviev or Kant or Marx. Only individuals seek the truth, and they shun those whose sole concern is not the truth.

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.

'He who seeks may easily get lost himself. It is a crime to go apart and be alone.' Thus speaks the herd.

I've always been opposed to groups. I can't believe the doctrine of group is going to work for every single person within the group.

Individualism has really the higher aim. Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one's age.

Les masses ont tort et les individus toujours raison. The masses are wrong; individuals are always right.

A pack of lemmings looks like a group of rugged individualists compared with Wall Street when it gets a concept in its teeth.

Her own contempt for any forms of pressure society might put on her was so profound and instinctive that she as instinctively despised anyone who paid tribute to them.

The nation was not founded by habitual groupthinkers. But it stands a fair chance of being destroyed by them.

most Americans are in deep awe of things-as-they-are. Even with everything this obviously out of control, they still tell themselves that those in authority must know what they are doing, and must be describing our condition to us as it really is; they still take it for granted that somehow what is, what is done, must make sense, can't really be insane. These assumptions exercise a tyranny over their minds.