“Every form of happiness if one, every desire is driven by the same motor--by our love for a single value, for the highest potentiality of our own existence--and every achievement is an expression of it.”

Russian-American writer and philosopher

Ayn Rand, born Alice O'Connor, was a Russian-American writer and philosopher. She is known for her fiction and for developing Objectivism, the philosophical system she named. Her work brought together storytelling and philosophy, and she became closely associated with a body of ideas that she presented as Objectivism. Her writing is known for combining fiction with arguments about reason, individualism, and the role of philosophy in life.