Ayn Rand on Knowledge
Browse 7 quotations attributed to Ayn Rand, catalogued under knowledge, with dates where available.
This page displays 7 quotations attributed to Ayn Rand and filed under "knowledge" in QuoteLineage. The selection is ordered by stored importance and quality scores, not citation counts. A topic label describes how an entry is catalogued; it does not establish the theme's importance in the author's work.
Attributed to Ayn Rand, entry #19514: "The highest thing in a man is not his god. It's that in him which knows the reverence due a god. You are my highest reverence."
Attributed to Ayn Rand, entry #53784: "Errors of knowledge are not breaches of morality; no proper moral code can demand infallibility or omniscience."
7 Quotes by Ayn Rand on Knowledge
"The highest thing in a man is not his god. It's that in him which knows the reverence due a god. You are my highest reverence."
"Errors of knowledge are not breaches of morality; no proper moral code can demand infallibility or omniscience."
"It is futile to fight against, if one does not know what one is fighting for."
"There is no such thing as duty. If you know that a thing is right, you want to do it. If you don't want to do it—it isn't right. If it's right and you don't want to do it—you don't know what right is and you're not a man."
"... if the majority of men cannot know what is good for them, each for himself, how can they know what is good for others by proxy? If they are to be controlled by specialists, how and by what standard can they choose the specialist?"
"Do you believe in God, Andrei? No. Neither do I. But that's a favorite question of mine. An upside-down question, you know. What do you mean? Well, if I asked people whether they believed in life, they'd never understand what I meant. It's a bad question. It can mean so much that it really means nothing. So I ask them if they believe in God. And if they say they do—then, I know they don't believe in life. Why? Because, you see, God—whatever anyone chooses to call God—is one's highest conception of the highest possible. And whoever places his highest conception above his own possibility thinks very little of himself and his life. It's a rare gift, you know, to feel reverence for your own life and to want the best, the greatest, the highest possible, here, now, for your very own. To imagine a heaven and then not to dream of it, but to demand it."
"The secret dread of modern intellectuals, liberals and conservatives alike, the unadmitted terror at the root of their anxiety, which all of their current irrationalities are intended to stave off and to disguise, is the unstated knowledge that Soviet Russia is the full, actual, literal, consistent embodiment of the morality of altruism, that Stalin did not corrupt a noble ideal, that this is the only way altruism has to be or can ever be practiced."