Biography

When she appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962) he had originally intended to bring her on during the last few minutes. After talking with her before the broadcast, he threw out the entire program and put her on for the duration.

Michael Caine named his older daughter Dominique after the heroine of The Fountainhead (1949).

Turned twenty-one during her voyage to America, and also changed her name, in part to protect her family back in Soviet Russia. "Ayn" (rhymes with "mine") came from a Finnish author. The exact origin of her last name is uncertain; however, in 1936, she told the New York Evening Post that 'Rand is an abbreviation of my Russian surname.' An oft-repeated story claims that Ayn Rand took her last name from her Remington Rand typewriter while she was living in Chicago in 1926, but this is not true because the Remington and Rand companies did not merge until 1927; 'Rand' did not appear on their (or any) typewriters until the early 1930s. Yet another theory is that "Rosenbaum" spelled out in Russian Cyrilic letters resembles "Rand Ayn" in English Latin letters. She kept her initials A.R.; explaining later "Two kinds of people keep their initials when they change their names - criminals and writers," to her protegé Nathaniel Branden (himself born Nathan Blumenthal).

She called her philosophy of rational selfishness "Objectivism", and wrote what would be her last novel, "Atlas Shrugged", as an illustration of it. She spent her later years writing articles, books and a newsletter on Objectivism.

Shortly before her death in the early '80s, when she appeared on Donahue (1967), she expressed admiration for the Charlie's Angels (1976) TV series, defending it as a form of romantic fiction.

The skyline of New York is a monument of a splendor that no pyramids or palaces will ever equal or approach.

Altruism declares that any action taken for the benefit of others is good, and any action taken for one's own benefit is evil. Thus the beneficiary of an action is the only criterion of moral value - and so long as that beneficiary is anybody than oneself, anything goes.

Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future.

Productive work is the central purpose of a rational man's life, the central value that integrates and determines the hierarchy of all his other values. Reason is the source, the precondition of his productive work - pride is the result.

To hold an unchanging youth is to reach at the end, the vision with which one started.