"I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."
— Ayn Rand
I Swear By My Life And
I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
About this quote
This is the oath sworn by John Galt and the other strikers at the end of Part III, Chapter 1 of Atlas Shrugged (1957), Rand's magnum opus. It serves as the philosophical cornerstone of Galt's Gulch — the community of rational producers who have withdrawn from a society that demands they live for others. Rand considered this the most succinct formulation of her ethics: that one's own life is the highest value, and living for another at the expense of oneself is a moral contradiction.
Source
Atlas Shrugged, Part III, Chapter 1 (1957)
