“The view that man was ever to be drawn by some vision of the unattainable shining ahead, doomed ever to aspire, but not to achieve, my life and my values could not bring me to that.”

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.