Ayn Rand - Quotes 1-393
But why should you care what people will say? All you have to do is please yourself.
Ayn Rand
I don't work with collectives. I don't consult, I don't co-operate, I don't collaborate.
Ayn Rand
It was the greatest sensation of existence: not to trust but to know.
Ayn Rand
To rest one's case on faith means to concede that reason is on the side of one's enemies - that one has no rational arguments to offer.
Ayn Rand
No speech is ever considered, but only the speaker. It's so much easier to pass judgement on a man than on an idea.
Ayn Rand
Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind, and a step that travels unlimited roads.
Ayn Rand
The small minority of adults who are unable rather than unwilling to work, have to rely on voluntary charity; misfortune is not a claim to slave labor; there is no such thing as the right to consume, control, and destroy those without whom one would be unable to survive.
Ayn Rand
In regard to the moral aspects of birth control, the primary right involved is not the 'right' of an unborn child, nor of the family, nor of society, nor of God. The primary right is one which - in today's public clamor on the subject - few, if any, voices have had the courage to uphold: the right of man and woman to their own life and happiness - the right not to be regarded as the means to any end.
Ayn Rand
Actors change, but the course of the tragedy remains the same. A humanitarian who starts with declarations of love for mankind and ends with a sea of blood.
Ayn Rand
A spirit, too, needs fuel. It can run dry.
Ayn Rand
Production is the application of reason to the problem of survival.
Ayn Rand
In a free society, one does not have to deal with those who are irrational. One is free to avoid them.
Ayn Rand
The faculty that works by means of concepts is reason. The process is thinking.
Ayn Rand
Freedom, in a political context, has only one meaning: the absence of physical coercion.
Ayn Rand
Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's value.
Ayn Rand
Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.
Ayn Rand
Observe that in World War II, both Germany and Russia seized and dismantled entire factories in conquered countries, to ship them home - while the freest of the mixed economies, the semi-capitalistic United States, sent billions worth of lend-lease equipment, including entire factories, to its allies.
Ayn Rand
As man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul.
Ayn Rand
The notion that 'Anything society does is right because society chose to do it,' is not a moral principle, but a negation of moral principles and the banishment of morality from social issues.
Ayn Rand
Anyone who fights for the future lives in it today.
Ayn Rand
There is only one source of authentic self-confidence: reason.
Ayn Rand
There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.
Ayn Rand
Humor is not an unconditional virtue; its moral character depends on its object. To laugh at the contemptible, is a virtue; to laugh at the good, is a hideous vice. Too often, humor is used as the camouflage of moral cowardice.
Ayn Rand
I think, therefore I'll think.
Ayn Rand
The word 'We' is as lime poured over men, which sets and hardens to stone, and crushes all beneath it, and that which is white and that which is black are lost equally in the grey of it. It is the word by which the depraved steal the virtue of the good, by which the weak steal the might of the strong, by which the fools steal the wisdom of the sages.
Ayn Rand
Fascism and communism are not two opposites, but two rival gangs fighting over the same territory… both are variants of statism, based on the collectivist principle that man is the rightless slave of the state.
Ayn Rand
Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea.
Ayn Rand
Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation's troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen.
Ayn Rand
Those who tell you that man is unable to perceive a reality undistorted by his senses, mean that they are unwilling to perceive a reality undistorted by their feelings. 'Things as they are' are things as perceived by your mind; divorce them from reason and they become 'things as perceived by your wishes.'
Ayn Rand
America was created by men who broke with all political traditions and who originated a system unprecedented in history, relying on nothing but the 'unaided' power of their own intellect.
Ayn Rand
The worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt.
Ayn Rand
A group, as such, has no rights. A man can neither acquire new rights by joining a group nor lose the rights which he does possess. The principle of individual rights is the only moral base of all groups or associations. Any group that does not recognize this principle is not an association, but a gang or a mob.
Ayn Rand
The process of thinking is the process of defining identity and discovering causal connections.
Ayn Rand
There is no principle by which genocide - a crime against a group of men - can be regarded as morally different from (or worse than) a crime against an individual: the difference is only quantitative, not moral. It can be easily demonstrated that Communism means and requires the extermination - the genocide, if you wish - of a particular human species: the men of ability.
Ayn Rand
Evil requires the sanction of the victim.
Ayn Rand
The quickest way to kill the human spirit is to ask someone to do mediocre work.
Ayn Rand
And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride. This god, this one word: 'I'
Ayn Rand
FCC power rests on… nonobjective law which delivers men's lives, fortunes, careers, ambitions into the arbitrary power of a bureaucrat who can reward or punish at whim.
Ayn Rand
The political function of 'the right of free speech' is to protect dissenters and unpopular minorities from forcible suppression - not to guarantee them the support, advantages, and rewards of a popularity they have not gained.
Ayn Rand
I am neither foe nor friend to my brothers, but such as each of them shall deserve of me. And to earn my love, my brothers must do more than to have been born. I do not grant my love without reason, nor to any chance passer-by who may wish to claim it. I honor men with my love. But honor is a thing to be earned.
Ayn Rand
Thinking is not an automatic function. In any hour and issue of his life, man is free to think or to evade that effort. Thinking requires a state of full, focused awareness. The act of focusing one's consciousness is volitional.
Ayn Rand
The notion of racial quotas is so obviously an expression of racism that no lengthy discussion is necessary. If a young man is barred from a school or a job because the quota for his particular race has been filled, he is barred by reason of his race. Telling him that those admitted are his 'representatives,' is adding insult to injury.
Ayn Rand
Self-respect is something that can't be killed. The worst thing is to kill a man's pretense at it.
Ayn Rand
Statism needs war; a free country does not. Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by production.
Ayn Rand
It has often been noted that a proof of God would be fatal to religion: a God susceptible of proof would have to be finite and limited; He would be one entity among others within the universe, not a mystic omnipotence transcending science and reality. What nourishes the spirit of religion is not proof, but faith, i.e., the undercutting of man's mind.
Ayn Rand
And here, over the portals of my fort, I shall cut in the stone the word which is to be my beacon and my banner. The word which will not die should we all perish in battle. The word which can never die on this earth, for it is the heart of it and the meaning and the glory. The sacred word: Ego
Ayn Rand
Money is the barometer of society's virtue.
Ayn Rand
Contrary to the prevalent views of today's alleged scholars, history is not an unintelligible chaos ruled by chance and whim - historical trends can be predicted, and changed - men are not helpless, blind, doomed creatures carried to destruction by incomprehensible forces beyond their control.
Ayn Rand
The basic premise of crude, primitive tribal collectivism is the notion that wealth belongs to the tribe or to society as a whole, and that every individual has the 'right' to 'participate' in it.
Ayn Rand
Nothing can raise a country's productivity except technology, and technology is the final product of a complex of sciences (including philosophy), each of them kept alive and moving by the achievements of a few independent minds.
Ayn Rand
In a fully free society, taxation - or, to be exact, payment for governmental services - would be voluntary. Since the proper services of a government - the police, the armed forces, the law courts - are demonstrably needed by individual citizens and affect their interests directly, the citizens would (and should) be willing to pay for such services, as they pay for insurance.
Ayn Rand
Wars are the second greatest evil that human societies can perpetrate. The first is dictatorship, the enslavement of their own citizens, which is the cause of wars.
Ayn Rand
A leash is a rope with a noose at both ends.
Ayn Rand
The basic need of the creator is independence. The reasoning mind cannot work under any form of compulsion. It cannot be curbed, sacrificed or subordinated to any consideration whatsoever. It demands total independence in function and in motive. To a creator, all relations with men are secondary.
Ayn Rand
There can be no compromise on basic principles. There can be no compromise on moral issues. There can be no compromise on matters of knowledge, of truth, of rational conviction.
Ayn Rand
Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants.
Ayn Rand
Dictatorship and determinism are reciprocally reinforcing corollaries: if one seeks to enslave men, one has to destroy their reliance on the validity of their own judgments and choices - if one believes that reason and volition are impotent, one has to accept the rule of force.
Ayn Rand
Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. The mind is an attribute of the individual.
Ayn Rand
Socialism is not a movement of the people. It is a movement of the intellectuals, originated, led and controlled by the intellectuals, carried by them out of their stuffy ivory towers into those bloody fields of practice where they unite with their allies and executors: the thugs.
Ayn Rand
There are only two fundamental methods by which men can deal with one another: by reason or by force, by intellectual persuasion or by physical coercion, by directing to an opponent's brain an argument - or a bullet.
Ayn Rand
An individualist is a man who says: 'I will not run anyone's life - nor let anyone run mine. I will not rule nor be ruled. I will not be a master nor a slave. I will not sacrifice myself to anyone - nor sacrifice anyone to myself.'
Ayn Rand
To the extent to which a man is rational, life is the premise directing his actions. To the extent to which he is irrational, the premise directing his actions is death.
Ayn Rand
The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breaches or fraud by the others, to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law.
Ayn Rand
Every man builds his world in his own image; he has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice. If he abdicates his power, he abdicates the status of man, and the grinding chaos of the irrational is what he achieves as his sphere of existence - by his own choice.
Ayn Rand
Psychologically, the choice 'to think or not' is the choice 'to focus or not.' Existentially, the choice 'to focus or not' is the choice 'to be conscious or not.' Metaphysically, the choice 'to be conscious or not' is the choice of life or death.
Ayn Rand
The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man's self-defense, and, as such, may resort to force only against those who start the use of force.
Ayn Rand
Capitalism wins and holds its markets by free competition, at home and abroad. A market conquered by war can be of value (temporarily) only to those advocates of a mixed economy who seek to close it to international competition, impose restrictive regulations, and thus acquire special privileges by force.
Ayn Rand
So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another - their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.
Ayn Rand
When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is learning to understand and control the behavior of crop plants and domestic animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized.
Ayn Rand
Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life.
Ayn Rand
Only three brief periods of history were culturally dominated by a philosophy of reason: ancient Greece, the Renaissance, the nineteenth century. These three periods were the source of mankind's greatest progress in all fields of intellectual achievement - and the eras of greatest political freedom.
Ayn Rand
Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.
Ayn Rand
A right is the sanction of independent action. A right is that which can be exercised without anyone's permission. If you exist only because society permits you to exist - you have no right to your own life. A permission can be revoked at any time.
Ayn Rand
You have been the one encounter in my life that can never be repeated.
Ayn Rand
That an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error.
Ayn Rand
Faith in the supernatural begins as faith in the superiority of others.
Ayn Rand
No one is born with any kind of 'talent' and, therefore, every skill has to be acquired. Writers are made, not born. To be exact, writers are self-made.
Ayn Rand
The welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes.
Ayn Rand
That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call 'free will' is your mind's freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character.
Ayn Rand
The precondition of a civilized society is the barring of physical force from social relationships - thus establishing the principle that if men wish to deal with one another, they may do so only by means of reason: by discussion, persuasion and voluntary, uncoerced agreement.
Ayn Rand
But what man does out of despair, is not necessarily a key to his character. I have always thought that the real key is in that which he seeks for his enjoyment.
Ayn Rand
If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.
Ayn Rand
The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.
Ayn Rand
Be it a highwayman who confronts a traveler with the ultimatum: 'Your money or your life,' or a politician who confronts a country with the ultimatum: 'Your children's education or your life,' the meaning of that ultimatum is: 'Your mind or your life' - and neither is possible to man without the other.
Ayn Rand
The charming aspect of Christmas is the fact that it expresses good will in a cheerful, happy, benevolent, non-sacrificial way. One says: 'Merry Christmas' - not 'Weep and Repent.' And the good will is expressed in a material, earthly form - by giving presents to one's friends, or by sending them cards in token of remembrance.
Ayn Rand
Don't set out to raze all shrines, you'll frighten men, enshrine mediocrity - and the shrines are razed.
Ayn Rand
Of special significance to the present discussion is the egalitarians' defiance of the Law of Causality: their demand for equal results from unequal causes - or equal rewards for unequal performance.
Ayn Rand
Observe that any social movement which begins by 'redistributing' income, ends up by distributing sacrifices.
Ayn Rand
When 'the common good' of a society is regarded as something apart from and superior to the individual good of its members, it means that the good of some men takes precedence over the good of others, with those others consigned to the status of sacrificial animals.
Ayn Rand
Only a process of final causation - i.e., the process of choosing a goal, then taking the steps to achieve it - can give logical continuity, coherence and meaning to a man's actions.
Ayn Rand
Just as an individual has the right of self-defense, so has a free country if attacked. But this does not give its government the right to draft men into military service - which is the most blatantly statist violation of a man's right to his own life.
Ayn Rand
You don't see advocates of reason and science clogging a street in the belief that using their bodies to stop traffic will solve any problem.
Ayn Rand
To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason - Purpose - Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge - Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve - Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living.
Ayn Rand
The human characteristic required by statism is docility, which is the product of hopelessness and intellectual stagnation. Thinking men cannot be ruled; ambitious men do not stagnate.
Ayn Rand
The businessman's tool is values; the bureaucrat's tool is fear.
Ayn Rand
Government control of a country's economy - any kind or degree of such control, by any group, for any purpose whatsoever - rests on the basic principle of statism, the principle that man's life belongs to the state.
Ayn Rand
Integrity does not consist of loyalty to one's subjective whims, but of loyalty to rational principles.
Ayn Rand
The intellectuals are a group that holds a unique prerogative: the potential of being either the most productive or the most parasitical of all social groups.
Ayn Rand
The American system is not a democracy. It is a constitutional republic. A democracy, if you attach meaning to terms, is a system of unlimited majority rule.
Ayn Rand
Many words have been granted me, and some are wise, and some are false, but only three are holy: 'I will it!'
Ayn Rand
Let those who are actually concerned with peace observe that capitalism gave mankind the longest period of peace in history - a period during which there were no wars involving the entire civilized world - from the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914.
Ayn Rand
The irrational is the impossible; it is that which contradicts the facts of reality; facts cannot be altered by a wish, but they can destroy the wisher.
Ayn Rand
If a nation cannot survive half-slave, half-free, consider the condition of a nation in which every social group becomes both the slave and the enslaver of every other group. Ask yourself how long such a condition can last and what is its inevitable outcome.
Ayn Rand
The Communists' chief purpose is to destroy every form of independence - independent work, independent action, independent property, independent thought, an independent mind, or an independent man. Conformity, alikeness, servility, submission and obedience are necessary to establish a Communist slave-state.
Ayn Rand
There are two aspects of man's existence which are the special province and expression of his sense of life: love and art.
Ayn Rand
Rationalization is a process of not perceiving reality, but of attempting to make reality fit one's emotions.
Ayn Rand
Man's mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action.
Ayn Rand
There are no evil thoughts except one: the refusal to think.
Ayn Rand
The moral justification of capitalism lies in the fact that it is the only system consonant with man's rational nature, that it protects man's survival qua man, and that its ruling principle is: justice.
Ayn Rand
Gold and economic freedom are inseparable - the gold standard is an instrument of laissez-faire and each implies and requires the other.
Ayn Rand
The political philosophy of collectivism is based on a view of man as a congenital incompetent, a helpless, mindless creature who must be fooled and ruled by a special elite with some unspecified claim to superior wisdom and a lust for power.
Ayn Rand
The communists and the Nazis are merely two variants of the same evil notion: collectivism. But both should be free to speak - evil ideas are dangerous only by default of men advocating better ideas.
Ayn Rand
The tribal notion of 'the common good' has served as the moral justification of most social systems - and of all tyrannies - in history. The degree of a society's enslavement or freedom corresponded to the degree to which that tribal slogan was invoked or ignored.
Ayn Rand
Within the extent of your knowledge, you are right.
Ayn Rand
To combat petty larceny as a crucial danger, at a time when murder is being committed, is to sanction the murder.
Ayn Rand
What is man? He's just a collection of chemicals with delusions of grandeur.
Ayn Rand
The only purpose of education is to teach a student how to live his life - by developing his mind and equipping him to deal with reality.
Ayn Rand
The man without a purpose is a man who drifts at the mercy of random feelings or unidentified urges and is capable of any evil, because he is totally out of control of his own life.
Ayn Rand
Instead of prosperity, socialism has brought economic paralysis and/or collapse to every country that tried it. The degree of socialization has been the degree of disaster. The consequences have varied accordingly.
Ayn Rand
A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man's self-defense, and, as such, may resort to force only against those who start the use of force.
Ayn Rand
Like every other form of collectivism, racism is a quest for the unearned. It is a quest for automatic knowledge - for an automatic evaluation of men's characters that bypasses the responsibility of exercising rational or moral judgment - and, above all, a quest for an automatic self-esteem (or pseudo-self-esteem).
Ayn Rand
When you clamor for public ownership of the means of production, you are clamoring for public ownership of the mind.
Ayn Rand
Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others. By what criterion of justice is a consensus-government to be guided? By the size of the victim's gang.
Ayn Rand
We are not used to persons who do things simply for the love of god whom they don't believe in.
Ayn Rand
My views on charity are very simple. I do not consider it a major virtue and, above all, I do not consider it a moral duty. There is nothing wrong in helping other people, if and when they are worthy of the help and you can afford to help them. I regard charity as a marginal issue. What I am fighting is the idea that charity is a moral duty and a primary virtue.
Ayn Rand
The cult of moral grayness is a revolt against moral values.
Ayn Rand
There can be no compromise between a property owner and a burglar; offering the burglar a single teaspoon of one's silverware would not be a compromise, but a total surrender - the recognition of his right to one's property.
Ayn Rand
Inflation is not caused by the actions of private citizens, but by the government: by an artificial expansion of the money supply required to support deficit spending. No private embezzlers or bank robbers in history have ever plundered people's savings on a scale comparable to the plunder perpetrated by the fiscal policies of statist governments.
Ayn Rand
Rationality is the recognition of the fact that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it.
Ayn Rand
Collectivism does not preach sacrifice as a temporary means to some desirable end. Sacrifice is its end - sacrifice as a way of life. It is man's independence, success, prosperity, and happiness that collectivists wish to destroy.
Ayn Rand
Without machines and technology, the task of mere survival is a terrible, mind-and-body-wrecking ordeal. In 'nature,' the struggle for food, clothing and shelter consumes all of a man's energy and spirit; it is a losing struggle - the winner is any flood, earthquake or swarm of locusts.
Ayn Rand
All the evils, abuses, and iniquities, popularly ascribed to businessmen and to capitalism, were not caused by an unregulated economy or by a free market, but by government intervention into the economy.
Ayn Rand
When we say that we hold individual rights to be inalienable, we must mean just that. Inalienable means that which we may not take away, suspend, infringe, restrict or violate - not ever, not at any time, not for any purpose whatsoever.
Ayn Rand
A culture is made - or destroyed - by its articulate voices.
Ayn Rand
A rational man never distorts or corrupts his own standards and judgment in order to appeal to the irrationality, stupidity, or dishonesty of others.
Ayn Rand
Man - every man - is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others; he must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; he must work for his rational self-interest, with the achievement of his own happiness as the highest moral purpose of his life.
Ayn Rand
There is no affirmation without the one who affirms. In this sense, everything to which you grant your love is yours.
Ayn Rand
Modern collectivists… see society as a super-organism, as some supernatural entity apart from and superior to the sum of its individual members.
Ayn Rand
The first choice - and the only one that matters - is: freedom or dictatorship, capitalism or statism.
Ayn Rand
For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbors - between those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it.
Ayn Rand
Morally, the promise of an impossible 'right' to economic security is an infamous attempt to abrogate the concept of rights. It can and does mean only one thing: a promise to enslave the men who produce, for the benefit of those who don't.
Ayn Rand
Morality is a code of black and white. When and if men attempt a compromise, it is obvious which side will necessarily lose and which will necessarily profit.
Ayn Rand
The most selfish of all things is the independent mind that recognizes no authority higher than its own and no value higher than its judgment of truth.
Ayn Rand
Freedom of speech means freedom from interference, suppression or punitive action by the government - and nothing else. It does not mean the right to demand the financial support or the material means to express your views at the expense of other men who may not wish to support you.
Ayn Rand
Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries.
Ayn Rand
Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices.
Ayn Rand
One must never allow oneself to acquire an exaggerated sense of one's own importance. There's no necessity to burden oneself with absolutes.
Ayn Rand
Your self is your mind; renounce it and you become a chunk of meat ready for any cannibal to swallow.
Ayn Rand
Ancient Greece tore away the heavy shroud of mysticism woven for centuries in murky temples, and achieved, in three centuries, what Egypt had not dreamed of in thirty: a civilization that was essentially pro-man and pro-life.
Ayn Rand
The present state of the world is not the proof of philosophy's impotence, but the proof of philosophy's power. It is philosophy that has brought men to this state - it is only philosophy that can lead them out.
Ayn Rand
'Lobbying' is the activity of attempting to influence legislation by privately influencing the legislators. It is the result and creation of a mixed economy - of government by pressure groups.
Ayn Rand
My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.
Ayn Rand
No man can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation, an unrewarded duty or an involuntary servitude on another man. There can be no such thing as 'the right to enslave.'
Ayn Rand
Concrete problems cannot even be grasped, let alone judged or solved, without reference to abstract principles.
Ayn Rand
The basic and crucial political issue of our age is: capitalism versus socialism, or freedom versus statism. For decades, this issue has been silenced, suppressed, evaded, and hidden under the foggy, undefined rubber-terms of 'conservatism' and 'liberalism' which had lost their original meaning and could be stretched to mean all things to all men.
Ayn Rand
Pity for the guilty is treason to the innocent.
Ayn Rand
To deal with men by force is as impractical as to deal with nature by persuasion.
Ayn Rand
The mark of an honest man is that he means what he says and knows what he means.
Ayn Rand
When men abandon reason, physical force becomes their only means of dealing with one another and of settling disagreements.
Ayn Rand
Philosophy provides man with a comprehensive view of life. In order to evaluate it properly, ask yourself what a given theory, if accepted, would do to a human life, starting with your own.
Ayn Rand
The men who are not interested in philosophy absorb its principles from the cultural atmosphere around them - from schools, colleges, books, magazines, newspapers, movies, television, etc. Who sets the tone of a culture? A small handful of men: the philosophers. Others follow their lead, either by conviction or by default.
Ayn Rand
The New Left does not portend a revolution, as its press agents claim, but a Putsch. A revolution is the climax of a long philosophical development and expresses a nation's profound discontent; a Putsch is a minority's seizure of power. The goal of a revolution is to overthrow tyranny; the goal of a Putsch is to establish it.
Ayn Rand
Since religion is a primitive form of philosophy - an attempt to offer a comprehensive view of reality - many of its myths are distorted, dramatized allegories based on some element of truth, some actual, if profoundly elusive, aspect of man's existence.
Ayn Rand
If a man proposes to redistribute wealth, he means explicitly and necessarily that the wealth is his to distribute. If he proposes it in the name of the government, then the wealth belongs to the government; if in the name of society, then it belongs to society. No one, to my knowledge, did or could define a difference between that proposal and the basic principle of communism.
Ayn Rand
In order to sustain its life, every living species has to follow a certain course of action required by its nature. The action required to sustain human life is primarily intellectual: everything man needs has to be discovered by his mind and produced by his effort. Production is the application of reason to the problem of survival.
Ayn Rand
When a theory achieves nothing but the opposite of its alleged goals, yet its advocates remain undeterred, you may be certain that it is not a conviction or an 'ideal,' but a rationalization.
Ayn Rand
Today, racism is regarded as a crime if practiced by a majority - but as an inalienable right if practiced by a minority. The notion that one's culture is superior to all others solely because it represents the traditions of one's ancestors, is regarded as chauvinism if claimed by a majority - but as 'ethnic' pride if claimed by a minority.
Ayn Rand
A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race - and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin.
Ayn Rand
Today, intelligence is neither recognized nor rewarded, but is being systematically extinguished in a growing flood of brazenly flaunted irrationality.
Ayn Rand
The professional businessman and the professional intellectual came into existence together, as brothers born of the industrial revolution. Both are the sons of capitalism - and if they perish, they will perish together. The tragic irony will be that they will have destroyed each other; and the major share of the guilt will belong to the intellectual.
Ayn Rand
A 'mixed economy' is a society in the process of committing suicide.
Ayn Rand
A mixed economy has to reach the day when it faces a final crossroad: either the private sector regains its freedom and starts rebuilding - or it gives up and lets the absolute state take over the shambles.
Ayn Rand
If parasitism, favoritism, corruption, and greed for the unearned did not exist, a mixed economy would bring them into existence.
Ayn Rand
We are not a capitalist system any longer: we are a mixed economy, i.e., a mixture of capitalism and statism, of freedom and controls. A mixed economy is a country in the process of disintegration, a civil war of pressure-groups looting and devouring one another.
Ayn Rand
A majority vote is not an epistemological validation of an idea. Voting is merely a proper political device - within a strictly, constitutionally delimited sphere of action - for choosing the practical means of implementing a society's basic principles. But those principles are not determined by vote.
Ayn Rand
Faith and force... are corollaries: every period of history dominated by mysticism, was a period of statism, of dictatorship, of tyranny.
Ayn Rand
The principle of individual rights is the only moral base of all groups or associations. Any group that does not recognize this principle is not an association, but a gang or a mob.
Ayn Rand
America was created by men who broke with all political traditions and who originated a system unprecedented in history, relying on nothing but the 'unaided' power of their own intellect.
Ayn Rand
In order to deal with reality successfully - to pursue and achieve the values which his life requires - man needs self-esteem; he needs to be confident of his efficacy and worth.
Ayn Rand
The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.
Ayn Rand
The economic value of a man's work is determined, on a free market, by a single principle: by the voluntary consent of those who are willing to trade him their work or products in return. This is the moral meaning of the law of supply and demand.
Ayn Rand
The symbol of all relationships among such men, the moral symbol of respect for human beings, is the trade. A trader is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved.
Ayn Rand
When I die I hope to go to heaven - whatever that is - and I want to be able to afford the price of admission.
Ayn Rand
The inversion of all standards - the propagation of racism as anti-racist, of injustice as just, of immorality as moral, and the reasoning behind it, which is worse than the offenses - is flagrantly evident in the policy of preferential treatment for minorities (i.e., racial quotas) in employment and education.
Ayn Rand
Nothing is self-evident except the material of sensory perception.
Ayn Rand
The individual does possess the right of self-defense and that is the right which he delegates to the government, for the purpose of an orderly, legally defined enforcement.
Ayn Rand
A man’s self is his mind - the faculty that perceives reality, forms judgments, chooses values.
Ayn Rand
The worker who has a modest savings account, and the millionaire who invests a fortune (and all the men in between), are those who finance the future.
Ayn Rand
To discuss evil in a manner implying neutrality, is to sanction it.
Ayn Rand
The failure to give to a man what had never belonged to him can hardly be described as 'sacrificing his interests.'
Ayn Rand
'Sacrifice' does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious. 'Sacrifice' does not mean the rejection of the evil for the sake of the good, but of the good for the sake of the evil. 'Sacrifice' is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don’t.
Ayn Rand
'The greatest good for the greatest number' is one of the most vicious slogans ever foisted on humanity.
Ayn Rand
It is immoral for the U.S. (and for all free or semi-free countries) to engage in any undertaking with Soviet Russia as a partner. It is particularly immoral if the undertaking is intellectual or cultural. Such a partnership necessarily implies and proclaims the acceptance of Soviet Russia as a peaceful, well-meaning, civilized country.
Ayn Rand
What was Red China’s qualification for membership in the U.N.? The fact that her government seized power by force, and has maintained it for twenty-two years by terror. What disqualified Nationalist China (Taiwan)? The fact that she was a friend of the United States.
Ayn Rand
Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.
Ayn Rand
Do not make the mistake of the ignorant who think that an individualist is a man who says: 'I'll do as I please at everybody else's expense.' An individualist is a man who recognizes the inalienable individual rights of man - his own and those of others.
Ayn Rand
I can say - not as a patriotic bromide, but with full knowledge of the necessary metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, political and esthetic roots - that the United States of America is the greatest, the noblest and, in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world.
Ayn Rand
The difference between political power and any other kind of social 'power,' between a government and any private organization, is the fact that a government holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force.
Ayn Rand
The immediate goal is obvious: the destruction of the remnants of capitalism in today's mixed economy, and the establishment of a global dictatorship. This goal does not have to be inferred - many speeches and books on the subject state explicitly that the ecological crusade is a means to that end.
Ayn Rand
Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
Ayn Rand
A moment or an eternity - did it matter? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist.
Ayn Rand
Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man's only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.
Ayn Rand
'Democratic' in its original meaning refers to unlimited majority rule… a social system in which one's work, one's property, one's mind, and one's life are at the mercy of any gang that may muster the vote of a majority at any moment for any purpose.
Ayn Rand
Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. But, in fact, a man's sexual choice is the result and the sum of his fundamental convictions. Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life. Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself.
Ayn Rand
The infamous times you call the Dark Ages were an era of intelligence on strike, when men of ability went underground and lived undiscovered, studying in secret, and died, destroying the works of their mind, when only a few of the bravest martyrs remained to keep the human race alive.
Ayn Rand
Today, people are beginning to understand that the government's account is overdrawn, that a piece of paper is not the equivalent of a gold coin, or an automobile, or a loaf of bread - and that if you attempt to falsify monetary values, you do not achieve abundance, you merely debase the currency and go bankrupt.
Ayn Rand
Since things are what they are, since everything that exists possesses a specific identity, nothing in reality can occur causelessly or by chance.
Ayn Rand
Art (including literature) is the barometer of a culture. It reflects the sum of a society's deepest philosophical values; not its professed notions and slogans, but its actual view of man and of existence.
Ayn Rand
I write - and read - for the sake of the story. My basic test for any story is: 'Would I want to meet these characters and observe these events in real life? Is this story an experience worth living through for its own sake? Is the pleasure of contemplating these characters an end itself?'
Ayn Rand
What greater wealth is there than to own your life and to spend it on growing? Every living thing must grow. It can't stand still. It must grow or perish.
Ayn Rand
I can accept anything, except what seems to be the easiest for most people: the half-way, the almost, the just-about, the in-between.
Ayn Rand
The first right on earth is the right of the ego. Man's first duty is to himself. His moral law is never to place his prime goal within the persons of others. His moral obligation is to do what he wishes, provided his wish does not depend primarily upon other men.
Ayn Rand
The age of the skyscraper is gone. This is the age of the housing project. Which is always a prelude to the age of the cave.
Ayn Rand
The necessary consequence of man's right to life is his right to self-defense. In a civilized society, force may be used only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use.
Ayn Rand
I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone's right to one minute of my life.
Ayn Rand
There can be no justification for choosing any part of that which one knows to be evil.
Ayn Rand
To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That's what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul - would you understand why that's much harder?
Ayn Rand
The truth or falsehood of all of man's conclusions, inferences, thought and knowledge rests on the truth or falsehood of his definitions.
Ayn Rand
Learn to value yourself, which means: fight for your happiness.
Ayn Rand
One does not and cannot 'negotiate' with brutality, nor give it the benefit of the doubt. The moral absolute should be: if and when, in any dispute, one side initiates the use of physical force, that side is wrong - and no consideration or discussion of the issues is necessary or appropriate.
Ayn Rand
Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins.
Ayn Rand
Confidence in the power of man replaced dependence on the grace of God - and that rare intellectual orientation emerged, the key to the Enlightenment approach in every branch of philosophy: secularism without skepticism.
Ayn Rand
They do not want to own your fortune, they want you to lose it; they do not want to succeed, they want you to fail; they do not want to live, they want you to die; they desire nothing, they hate existence, and they keep running, each trying not to learn that the object of his hatred is himself.
Ayn Rand
There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.
Ayn Rand
If one's actions are honest, one does not need the predated confidence of others.
Ayn Rand
The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is self-sacrifice - which means; self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial, self-destruction - which means: the self as a standard of evil, the selfless as a standard of the good.
Ayn Rand
Ecology as a social principle… condemns cities, culture, industry, technology, the intellect, and advocates men's return to 'nature,' to the state of grunting subanimals digging the soil with their bare hands.
Ayn Rand
Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values.
Ayn Rand
We are all brothers under the skin - and I, for one, would be willing to skin humanity to prove it.
Ayn Rand
Just as man can't exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one's rights into reality, to think, to work and keep the results, which means: the right of property.
Ayn Rand
People create their own questions because they are afraid to look straight. All you have to do is look straight and see the road, and when you see it, don't sit looking at it - walk.
Ayn Rand
There is no such thing as a lousy job - only lousy men who don't care to do it.
Ayn Rand
Ethnicity is not a valid consideration, morally or politically, and does not endow anyone with any special rights.
Ayn Rand
It only stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.
Ayn Rand
One of the methods used by statists to destroy capitalism consists in establishing controls that tie a given industry hand and foot, making it unable to solve its problems, and then declaring that freedom has failed and stronger controls are necessary.
Ayn Rand
I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle.
Ayn Rand
When a man feels fear without reason, you call him to the attention of a psychiatrist; you are not so careful to protect the meaning, the nature and the dignity of love.
Ayn Rand
An inventor is a man who asks 'Why?' of the universe and lets nothing stand between the answer and his mind.
Ayn Rand
Contrary to the ecologists, nature does not stand still and does not maintain the kind of equilibrium that guarantees the survival of any particular species - least of all the survival of her greatest and most fragile product: man.
Ayn Rand
An attempt to achieve the good by force is like an attempt to provide a man with a picture gallery at the price of cutting out his eyes.
Ayn Rand
The ladder of success is best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity.
Ayn Rand
Observe the paradoxes built up about capitalism. It has been called a system of selfishness - yet it is the only system that drew men to unite on a large scale into great countries, and peacefully to cooperate across national boundaries, while all the collectivist, internationalist, One-World systems are splitting the world into Balkanized tribes.
Ayn Rand
There's so much nonsense about human inconstancy and the transience of all emotions. I've always thought that a feeling which changes never existed in the first place.
Ayn Rand
The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap.
Ayn Rand
To abstain from condemning a torturer, is to become an accessory to the torture and murder of his victims.
Ayn Rand
I shall choose friends among men, but neither slaves nor masters. And I shall choose only such as please me, and them I shall love and respect, but neither command nor obey. And we shall join our hands when we wish, or walk alone when we so desire.
Ayn Rand
Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions.
Ayn Rand
I'm waiting, for what, my kind of people, what kind is that, I can tell my kind of people by their faces, by something in their faces.
Ayn Rand
The more you learn, the more you know that you know nothing.
Ayn Rand
Since the golden age of Greece, there has been only one era of reason in twenty-three centuries of Western philosophy. During the final decades of that era, the United States of America was created as an independent nation. This is the key to the country - to its nature, its development, and its uniqueness: the United States is the nation of the Enlightenment.
Ayn Rand
All public projects are mausoleums, not always in shape, but always in cost.
Ayn Rand
Capitalism cannot work with slave labor. It was the agrarian, feudal South that maintained slavery. It was the industrial, capitalistic North that wiped it out - as capitalism wiped out slavery and serfdom in the whole civilized world of the nineteenth century.
Ayn Rand
Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration.
Ayn Rand
Whatever road I take, the guiding star is within me; the guiding star and the loadstone which point the way. They point in but one direction. They point to me.
Ayn Rand
The advocates of collectivism are motivated not by a desire for men's happiness, but by hatred for man… hatred of the good for being the good; the focus of that hatred, the target of its passionate fury, is the man of ability.
Ayn Rand
Every argument for God and every attribute ascribed to Him rests on a false metaphysical premise. None can survive for a moment on a correct metaphysics.
Ayn Rand
Genius is an exaggeration of dimension. So is elephantiasis. Both may be only a disease.
Ayn Rand
Only a man of integrity can possess the virtue of honesty, since only the faking of one's consciousness can permit the faking of existence.
Ayn Rand
Thousands of years ago the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burnt at the stake he'd taught his brothers to light, but he left them a gift they had not conceived and he lifted darkness from the face of the Earth.
Ayn Rand
A man's ego is the fountainhead of human progress.
Ayn Rand
Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason.
Ayn Rand
Collectivism holds that, in human affairs, the collective - society, the community, the nation, the proletariat, the race, etc. - is the unit of reality and the standard of value. On this view, the individual has reality only as part of the group, and value only insofar as he serves it.
Ayn Rand
Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer - and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.
Ayn Rand
Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.
Ayn Rand
There can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob.
Ayn Rand
The difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is a matter of time.
Ayn Rand
Man's unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself.
Ayn Rand
Aristotle may be regarded as the cultural barometer of Western history. Whenever his influence dominated the scene, it paved the way for one of history's brilliant eras; whenever it fell, so did mankind.
Ayn Rand
Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth, the man who would make his fortune no matter where he started.
Ayn Rand
Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?
Ayn Rand
The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.
Ayn Rand
Laissez-faire capitalism is the only social system based on the recognition of individual rights and, therefore, the only system that bans force from social relationships. By the nature of its basic principles and interests, it is the only system fundamentally opposed to war.
Ayn Rand
Every man is free to rise as far as he's able or willing, but the degree to which he thinks determines the degree to which he'll rise.
Ayn Rand
A quest for self-respect is proof of its lack.
Ayn Rand
Life is a value to be bought and thinking is the only coin noble enough to buy it.
Ayn Rand
Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of other men. Blood, whips and guns - or dollars. Take your choice - there is no other.
Ayn Rand
One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.
Ayn Rand
A building has integrity just like a man... and just as seldom.
Ayn Rand
Never mind the vicious nonsense of claiming that an embryo has a 'right to life.' A piece of protoplasm has no rights - and no life in the human sense of the term. One may argue about the later stages of a pregnancy, but the essential issue concerns only the first three months.
Ayn Rand
If men want to oppose war, it is statism that they must oppose. So long as they hold the tribal notion that the individual is sacrificial fodder for the collective, that some men have the right to rule others by force, and that some (any) alleged 'good' can justify it - there can be no peace within a nation and no peace among nations.
Ayn Rand
In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.
Ayn Rand
If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him.
Ayn Rand
Do not let the hero in your soul parish, in lonely frustration, for the life you deserved but never have been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won. It exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.
Ayn Rand
Abortion is a moral right - which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved; morally, nothing other than her wish in the matter is to be considered. Who can conceivably have the right to dictate to her what disposition she is to make of the functions of her own body?
Ayn Rand
Objectivists are not 'conservatives.' We are radicals for capitalism; we are fighting for that philosophical base which capitalism did not have and without which it was doomed to perish.
Ayn Rand
Government 'help' to business is just as disastrous as government persecution... the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off.
Ayn Rand
The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me.
Ayn Rand
It is true that nuclear weapons have made wars too horrible to contemplate. But it makes no difference to a man whether he is killed by a nuclear bomb or a dynamite bomb or an old-fashioned club. Nor does the number of other victims or the scale of the destruction make any difference to him.
Ayn Rand
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
The alleged shortcut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind.
Ayn Rand
Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy - a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but using your mind's fullest power.
Ayn Rand
To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. That is freedom. This and nothing else.
Ayn Rand
If some 'pacifist' society renounced the retaliatory use of force, it would be left helplessly at the mercy of the first thug who decided to be immoral. Such a society would achieve the opposite of its intention: instead of abolishing evil, it would encourage and reward it.
Ayn Rand
No man can live for another. He cannot share his spirit just as he cannot share his body. But the second-hander has used altruism as a weapon of exploitation and reversed the base of mankind's moral principles. Men have been taught every precept that destroys the creator. Men have been taught dependence as a virtue.
Ayn Rand
We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.
Ayn Rand
Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone.
Ayn Rand
To achieve, you need thought. You have to know what you are doing and that's real power.
Ayn Rand
Do not ever say that the desire to 'do good' by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.
Ayn Rand
Remember that rights are moral principles which define and protect a man's freedom of action, but impose no obligations on other men.
Ayn Rand
Place nothing above the verdict of your own mind.
Ayn Rand
I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.
Ayn Rand
A businessman cannot force you to work for him or to accept the wages he offers; you are free to seek employment elsewhere and to accept a better offer, if you can find it. A bureaucrat can force you to work for him, when he achieves the totalitarian power he seeks; he can force you to accept any payment he offers - or none, as witness the forced labor camps in the countries of full statism.
Ayn Rand
Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed.
Ayn Rand
Do not confuse appeasement with tactfulness or generosity. Appeasement is not consideration for the feelings of others; it is consideration for and compliance with the unjust, irrational and evil feelings of others. It is a policy of exempting the emotions of others from moral judgment, and of willingness to sacrifice innocent, virtuous victims to the evil malice of such emotions.
Ayn Rand
If a drought strikes them, animals perish - man builds irrigation canals; if a flood strikes them, animals perish - man builds dams; if a carnivorous pack attacks them, animals perish - man writes the Constitution of the United States.
Ayn Rand
When I say 'capitalism,' I mean a full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism - with a separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.
Ayn Rand
Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man's values, it has to be earned.
Ayn Rand
To love is to value. Only a rationally selfish man, a man of self-esteem, is capable of love - because he is the only man capable of holding firm, consistent, uncompromising, unbetrayed values. The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone.
Ayn Rand
The freedom of speech of private individuals includes the right to not agree, not to listen, and not to finance one's own antagonists.
Ayn Rand
Anarchy, as a political concept, is a naive floating abstraction. A society without an organized government would be at the mercy of the first criminal who came along and who would precipitate it into the chaos of gang warfare.
Ayn Rand
Any work is creative work if done by a thinking mind.
Ayn Rand
We have only two sources of information about the character of the people around us: we judge them by what they do and by what they say (particularly the first).
Ayn Rand
If one doesn't respect oneself one can have neither love nor respect for others.
Ayn Rand
I know not if this earth on which I stand is the core of the universe or if it is but a speck of dust lost in eternity. I know not and I care not. For I know what happiness is possible to me on earth. And my happiness needs no higher aim to vindicate it. My happiness is not a means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose.
Ayn Rand
I am not the means to any end others may wish to accomplish. I am not a tool for their use. I am not a servant of their needs. I am not a bandage for their wounds, I am not a sacrifice on their altars.
Ayn Rand
The higher animals are able to perceive entities, motions, attributes, and certain numbers of entities. But what an animal cannot perform is the process of abstraction - of mentally separating attributes, motions or numbers from entities. It has been said that an animal can perceive two oranges or two potatoes, but cannot grasp the concept 'two.'
Ayn Rand
There can be no compromise on moral principles.
Ayn Rand
A proper, philosophically valid definition of man as 'a rational animal,' would not permit anyone to ascribe the status of 'person' to a few human cells.
Ayn Rand
Today's 'conservatives' are futile, impotent and, culturally, dead. They have nothing to offer and can achieve nothing. They can only help to destroy intellectual standards, to disintegrate thought, to discredit capitalism, and to accelerate this country's uncontested collapse into despair and dictatorship.
Ayn Rand
Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
Ayn Rand
The trader and the warrior have been fundamental antagonists throughout history. Trade does not flourish on battlefields, factories do not produce under bombardments, profits do not grow on rubble. Capitalism is a society of traders - for which it has been denounced by every would-be gunman who regards trade as 'selfish' and conquest as 'noble.'
Ayn Rand
Do it first and feel about it afterwards.
Ayn Rand
Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.
Ayn Rand
Men who reject the responsibility of thought and reason can only exist as parasites on the thinking of others.
Ayn Rand
It is not advisable to venture unsolicited opinions. You should spare yourself the embarrassing discovery of their exact value to your listener.
Ayn Rand
I think. I am. I will.
Ayn Rand
To say 'I love you' one must know first how to say the 'I'.
Ayn Rand
Today, when a concerted effort is made to obliterate this point, it cannot be repeated too often that the Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals - that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government - that it is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizens' protection against the government.
Ayn Rand
Existence exists, and only existence exists. Existence is a primary: it is uncreated, indestructible, eternal. So if you are to postulate something beyond existence - some supernatural realm - you must do it by openly denying reason, dispensing with definitions, proofs, arguments, and saying flatly, 'To Hell with argument, I have faith.' That, of course, is a willful rejection of reason.
Ayn Rand
Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority.
Ayn Rand
My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose.
Ayn Rand
Learn to distinguish the difference between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality. An error of knowledge is not a moral flaw, provided you are willing to correct it; only a mystic would judge human beings by the standard of an impossible, automatic omniscience. But a breach of morality is the conscious choice of an action you know to be evil, or a willful evasion of knowledge, a suspension of sight and of thought.
Ayn Rand
The most depraved type of human being... the man without a purpose.
Ayn Rand
You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.
Ayn Rand
Is it advisable to spread out all the conveniences of culture before people to whom a few steps up a stair to a library is a sufficient deterrent from reading?
Ayn Rand
There's nothing as significant as a human face. Nor as eloquent. We can never really know another person, except by our first glance at him. Because, in that glance, we know everything. Even though we're not always wise enough to unravel the knowledge.
Ayn Rand
When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit.
Ayn Rand
Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.
Ayn Rand
I worship individuals for their highest possibilities as individuals and I loathe humanity for its failure to live up to these possibilities.
Ayn Rand
Never think of pain or danger or enemies a moment longer than is necessary to fight them.
Ayn Rand
Devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality; there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.
Ayn Rand
If you don't know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn.
Ayn Rand
When you hear the liberals mumble that Russia is not really socialistic, or that it was all Stalin's fault, or that socialism never had a real chance in England, or that what they advocate is something that's different somehow - you know that you are hearing the voices of men who haven't a leg to stand on, men who are reduced to some vague hope that 'somehow, my gang would have done it better.'
Ayn Rand
The concept of free competition enforced by law is a grotesque contradiction in terms. It means: forcing people to be free at the point of a gun. It means: protecting people's freedom by the arbitrary rule of unanswerable bureaucratic edicts.
Ayn Rand
Competition is a by-product of productive work, not its goal. A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.
Ayn Rand
Since only an individual man can possess rights, the expression 'individual rights' is a redundancy (which one has to use for purposes of clarification in today's intellectual chaos). But the expression 'collective rights' is a contradiction in terms.
Ayn Rand
When a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law - men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims - then money becomes its creators’ avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they’ve passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality.
Ayn Rand
Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision.
Ayn Rand
The essence of capitalism's foreign policy is free trade - i.e., the abolition of trade barriers, of protective tariffs, of special privileges - the opening of the world's trade routes to free international exchange and competition among the private citizens of all countries dealing directly with one another.
Ayn Rand
Why do they always teach us that it's easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It's the hardest thing in the world - to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want.
Ayn Rand
The right to vote is a consequence, not a primary cause, of a free social system - and its value depends on the constitutional structure implementing and strictly delimiting the voters' power; unlimited majority rule is an instance of the principle of tyranny.
Ayn Rand
There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them.
Ayn Rand
It is the basic, metaphysical fact of man's nature - the connection between his survival and his use of reason - that capitalism recognizes and protects.
Ayn Rand
The American businessmen, as a class, have demonstrated the greatest productive genius and the most spectacular achievements ever recorded in the economic history of mankind. What reward did they receive from our culture and its intellectuals? The position of a hated, persecuted minority. The position of a scapegoat for the evils of the bureaucrats.
Ayn Rand
There is no conflict of interests among men who do not desire the unearned, who do not make sacrifices nor accept them, who deal with one another as traders, giving value for value.
Ayn Rand
America's founding ideal was the principle of individual rights. Nothing more - and nothing less. The rest - everything that America achieved, everything she became, everything 'noble and just,' and heroic, and great, and unprecedented in human history - was the logical consequence of fidelity to that one principle.
Ayn Rand
Men who are free to produce, have no incentive to loot; they have nothing to gain from war and a great deal to lose.
Ayn Rand
Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.
Ayn Rand
'Censorship' is a term pertaining only to governmental action. No private action is censorship. No private individual or agency can silence a man or suppress a publication; only the government can do so. The freedom of speech of private individuals includes the right not to agree, not to listen and not to finance one's own antagonists.
Ayn Rand
Capitalism has been called cruel - yet it brought such hope, progress and general good will that the young people of today, who have not seen it, find it hard to believe.
Ayn Rand
Capitalism has been called nationalistic - yet it is the only system that banished ethnicity, and made it possible, in the United States, for men of various, formerly antagonistic nationalities to live together in peace.
Ayn Rand
Capitalism has been called a system of greed - yet it is the system that raised the standard of living of its poorest citizens to heights no collectivist system has ever begun to equal, and no tribal gang can conceive of.
Ayn Rand
Capitalism has created the highest standard of living ever known on earth. The evidence is incontrovertible. The contrast between West and East Berlin is the latest demonstration, like a laboratory experiment for all to see. Yet those who are loudest in proclaiming their desire to eliminate poverty are loudest in denouncing capitalism. Man's well-being is not their goal.
Ayn Rand
Politically, the goal of today's dominant trend is statism. Philosophically, the goal is the obliteration of reason; psychologically, it is the erosion of ambition.
Ayn Rand
If a society provided no organized protection against force, it would compel every citizen to go about armed, to turn his home into a fortress, to shoot any strangers approaching his door - or to join a protective gang of citizens who would fight other gangs, formed for the same purpose, and thus bring about the degeneration of that society into the chaos of gang-rule, i.e., rule by brute force, into perpetual tribal warfare of prehistorical savages.
Ayn Rand
If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing.
Ayn Rand
Objectivism advocates reason as man's sole means of knowledge, and therefore, for the reasons I have already given, it is atheist. It denies any supernatural dimension presented as a contradiction of nature, of existence. This applies not only to God, but also to every variant of the supernatural ever advocated or to be advocated. In other words, we accept reality, and that's all.
Ayn Rand
There is no such thing as collective guilt. This country has no guilt to atone for in regard to its black citizens. Slavery was an enormous evil. But a country that fought a civil war to abolish slavery has atoned for it.
Ayn Rand
A government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.
Ayn Rand
The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone.
Ayn Rand
Men have been taught that the ego is the synonym of evil, and selflessness the ideal of virtue. But the creator is the egoist in the absolute sense, and the selfless man is the one who does not think, feel, judge or act. These are functions of the self.
Ayn Rand
An embryo has no rights. Rights do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being. A child cannot acquire any rights until it is born. The living take precedence over the not-yet-living (or the unborn).
Ayn Rand
Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others.
Ayn Rand
Volumes can be and have been written about the issue of freedom versus dictatorship, but, in essence, it comes down to a single question: do you consider it moral to treat men as sacrificial animals and to rule them by physical force?
Ayn Rand
The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
Ayn Rand
There is nothing to take a man's freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers.
Ayn Rand
The essential characteristic of socialism is the denial of individual property rights.
Ayn Rand
Whoever claims the right to redistribute the wealth produced by others is claiming the right to treat human beings as chattel.
Ayn Rand
Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it - that no substitute can do your thinking, as no pinch-hitter can live your life.
Ayn Rand
There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.
Ayn Rand
From the smallest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from one attribute of man - the function of his reasoning mind.
Ayn Rand
The truth is not for all men, but only for those who seek it.
Ayn Rand
The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.
Ayn Rand
A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.
Ayn Rand
Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.
Ayn Rand
God... a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive.
Ayn Rand
Learn to distinguish the difference between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality.
Ayn Rand
Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting for us in our graves - or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.
Ayn Rand
We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality.
Ayn Rand
There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.
Ayn Rand
Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter.
Ayn Rand
Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think.
Ayn Rand
Whenever a country's criminal laws are more lenient than its civil laws, it means the country is accepting the basic principle of statism and is moving toward totalitarianism.
Ayn Rand
