"The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone."
— Ayn Rand
The Man Who Does Not Value
The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone.
About this quote
This argument appears in Chapter 1 of The Virtue of Selfishness (1964), Rand's collection of essays on her Objectivist ethics. Rand contended that self-esteem — the recognition of one's own rationality and competence — is the psychological foundation for all other values. Without it, she argued, a person has no stable basis for evaluating anything, including other people. The essay challenged conventional moral frameworks that treat self-sacrifice as the highest virtue.
Source
The Virtue of Selfishness, Chapter 1 (1964)
