Ayn Rand, 1905 - 1982
Photo by Phyllis Cerf (1957)
Born: 2 February 1905, Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire
Died: 6 March 1982, New York City
Born Alisa Zino'yevna Rosenbaum, the daughter of a Jewish pharmacist. Her intelligence meant that most of her friends were adults, and she formed an early appreciation for America based on the few films she saw. While she was not sympathetic to the Russian Revolution, it meant that women were allowed to enter the University of Petrograd for the first time; a member of that first class she graduated with honors in history in 1924. The next year she applied to visit relatives at Chicago, she left the next year, turning 21 at Berlin, and emigrated. She took the name Ayn Rand, the first based on a Finnish name (Ayna), the latter as her own abbreviation of her last name, based on its appearance in Cyrillic characters. The story that she took the name based on using a Remington-Rand typewriter appears to have no basis, particularly as she used the name well before Remington and Rand merged, and before any typewriters were sold under that name. One of her family owned a theater, allowing her to see a lot of movies for free, and she went to Hollywood to become a screen writer. Standing outside a studio entrance, Cecil B. DeMille offered her a lift, showed her the set of King of Kings, and hired her as an extra. Rand worked as an extra, script reader, and for a time was head of costumes for RKO. Most of her fiction was based on the concept of a "superman", which she saw as being possible only for an individual unrestrained by imposed obligations or standards. While in Hollywood she wrote The Fountainhead (1943), a novel which reached became a bestseller over the course of two years based only on word-of-mouth. She moved to New York City and spent almost a dozen years working on Atlas Shrugged, and spent most of the rest of her life developing the philosophy of Objectivism, the underpinning of all her fiction work, writing and lecturing. She died at home of heart failure.
Biography from Wikipedia and the Ayn Rand Institute
Additional quotes from Wikiquote. Wikiquote entries are often "sourced" and may include items longer than those included here, particularly for poets, lyricists, and dramatists.
Ayn Rand quotes:
Quotes found : 112 — (15 per page, this is page 1 of 8) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Next
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- A building has integrity, just like a man, and just as seldom. permalink
Ayn Rand - The Fountainhead (1943) - A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others. permalink
Ayn Rand - A culture is made — or destroyed — by its articulate voices. permalink
Ayn Rand - The Voice of Reason (1989) - A desire presupposes the possibility of action to achieve it; action presupposes a goal which is worth achieving. permalink
Ayn Rand - Atlas Shrugged (1957) - A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race—and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin. permalink
Ayn Rand - The Virtue of Selfishness (1964) - A gun is not an argument. permalink
Ayn Rand - Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966) - A leash is only a rope with a noose on both ends. permalink
Ayn Rand - The Fountainhead (1943) - Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death. permalink
Ayn Rand - All the reasons which made the initiation of physical force evil make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative. permalink
Ayn Rand - The Virtue of Selfishness (1964) - All work is an act of philosophy. permalink
Ayn Rand - Atlas Shrugged (1957) - America's abundance was not created by public sacrifices to the common good, but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes.
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Ayn Rand - Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966) - An artist reveals his naked soul in his work. permalink
Ayn Rand - The Romantic Manifesto (1969) - An attempt to achieve the good by force is like an attempt to provide a man with a picture gallery at the price of cutting out his eyes. permalink
Ayn Rand - Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966) - An inventor is a man who asks 'Why?' of the universe and lets nothing stand between the answer and his mind. permalink
Ayn Rand - Atlas Shrugged (1957) - Any group or "collective", large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members. permalink
Ayn Rand - The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)
Quotes found : 112 — (15 per page, this is page 1 of 8) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Next
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