Ayn Rand Quotes

Man's mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action...To remain alive, he must think.

A logical theory may be tested by its capacity for dealing with puzzles, and it is a wholesome plan, in thinking about logic, to stock the mind with as many puzzles as possible, since these serve much the same purpose as is served by experiments in physical science.

It is impossible to live without brains, either one's own or borrowed.

Thinking is not enough. There is no final enough of wisdom, experience - any... thing.

Science and literature are both ways to ask questions about why we're here.

Thinking is progress. Non-thinking is stagnation of the individual, organisation and the country. Thinking leads to action. Knowledge without action is useless and irrelevant. Knowledge with action, converts adversity into prosperity.

I think that everybody does hustle in order to survive. That doesn't mean lying - it's more about how you handle situations.

At issue is not only knowledge of the world but our survival as individuals and as a species. All the basic technologies ever invented by humans to feed and protect themselves depend on a relentless commitment to hard-nosed empiricism: you cannot assume that your arrowheads will pierce the hide of a bison or that your raft will float just because the omens are propitious and you have been given supernatural reassurance that they will. You have to be sure.

Care about understanding and before you know it, in just a few decades, you'll have a system of thinking that gives you answers whenever you ask.

What people most need now is to apply their conversion skills to those things that are essential for their survival. They need to convert facts into logic, free will into purpose, conscience into decision. They need to convert historical experience into a design for a sane world.

The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.

When I get the point, I often don't know what to do with it.

We need both information and thinking. Information is no substitute for thinking and thinking is no substitute for information.

The man who thinks he knows something does not yet know as he ought to know.

We spend the early years feeding our brains with information and the latter half trying not to think about it all.

When there is information, there is enlightenment. When there is debate, there are solutions.

It's easy, there's a trick to it, you do it or you die.

Reason is the main resource of man in his struggle for survival.

Knowledge, like all things, is best in moderation," intoned the Will. "Knowing everything means you don't need to think, and that is very dangerous.

He says, you have to study and learn so that you can make up your own mind about history and everything else but you can’t make up an empty mind. Stock your mind, stock your mind. It is your house of treasure and no one in the world can interfere with it. If you won the Irish Sweepstakes and bought a house that needed furniture would you fill it with bits and pieces of rubbish? Your mind is your house and if you fill it with rubbish from the cinemas it will rot in your head. You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.

One can never really give a proof of the reality of anything; reality is not something open to proof, it is something established. It is established just because proof is not enough. It is this characteristic of language, at once indispensable and inadequate, which shows the reality of the external world. Most people hardly ever realize this, because it is rare that the very same man thinks and puts his thought into action.

Methods and means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim.

Think about every problem, every challenge, we face. The solution to each starts with education.