Ayn Rand Quotes

If you don't have manufactured items or anything we think of as 'civilization,' then you're living according to your species.

Life on earth is hard. Competition for the necessities of life is fierce. How ridiculous to believe that the law of harsh survival would not be true elsewhere, or that it would be negated by the progress of technology in an advanced civilization.

Nature holds no brief for the human experiment; it must stand or fall by its results.

Today the world is a big jungle.

Nature favors those organisms which leave the environment in better shape for their progeny to survive.

I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection.

In October, 1838, … I happened to read for amusement Malthus on population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long continuous observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favorable variations would tend to be preserved and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work

Nature has no reverence towards life. Nature treats life as though it were the most valueless thing in the world....

Evolution never stops or ends. Such a cessation would be cataclysmic catastrophe.

The fate of the vast majority of species on this planet has been extinction, eventually.

One time, I took a woman on a deserted island, and we lived like Mother Nature for 10 days.

Yeah, I like going away for camp. It brings out the savagery.

We share deep admiration for evolution, a force of Nature that has led to the finest chemistry of all time, and to all living things on this planet.

Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive.

Life is a struggle, from the agonies of birth to the railing against death. Devour or be devoured. The law of the wild.

Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe.

From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of higher animals, directly follows.

What is too often forgotten is that nature obviously intends the botched to die, and that every interference with that benign process is full of dangers.

If they are sufficiently complete to live, they do live, and it is well they should live. If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best they should die.

In the whole vast dome of living nature there reigns an open violence, a kind of prescriptive fury which arms all the creatures to their common doom: as soon as you leave the inanimate kingdom you find the decree of violent death inscribed on the very frontiers of life.

Buzzards got to eat, same as the worms.

The life of a wild animal always has a tragic end.

Nature is a series of murders.

Man wants to see nature and evolution as separate from human activities. There is a natural world, and there is man. But man also belongs to the natural world. If he is a ferocious predator, that too is part of evolution. If cod and haddock and other species cannot survive because man kills them, something more adaptable will take their place. Nature, the ultimate pragmatist, doggedly searches for something that works. But as the cockroach demonstrates, what works best in nature does not always appeal to us.