Ayn Rand Quotes
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Do you know that my personal crusade in life (in the philosophical sense) is not merely to fight collectivism, nor to fight altruism? These are only consequences, effects, not causes. I am out after the real cause, the real root of evil on earth - the irrational.
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Let no man posture as an advocate of peace if he proposes or supports any social system that initiates the use of force against individual men, in any form.
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So long as men 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.
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The actions of all group leaders throughout history have had one common element: altruism - common good of the collective. Religious leaders and the 'moral' majority condemn the likes of Hitler, Stalin, etc. but their movements and foundations are alike.
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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.
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Every coercive monopoly was created by government intervention into the economy: by special privileges, such as franchises or subsidies, which closed the entry of competitors into a given field, by legislative action.
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The moral cannibalism of all hedonist and altruist doctrines lies in the premise that the happiness of one man necessitates the injury of another.
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The only proper, moral purpose of a government is to protect man’s rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence-to protect his right to his own life, to his own liberty, to his own property and to the pursuit of his own happiness. Without property rights, no other rights are possible.
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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.
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Art is man’s metaphysical mirror; what a rational man seeks to see in that mirror is a salute; what an irrational man seeks to see is a justification – even if only a justification of his depravity, as a last convulsion of his betrayed self-esteem.
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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.
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When a man declares: 'There are no blacks and whites in morality' he is making a psychological confession, and what he means is: 'I am unwilling to be wholly good-and please don't regard me as wholly evil!'
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Selfishness does not mean only to do things for one's self. One may do things, affecting others, for his own pleasure and benefit. This is not immoral, but the highest of morality.
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There is no such thing as duty. If you know that a thing is right, you want to do it. If you don't want to do it-it isn't right. If it's right and you don't want to do it-you don't know what right is and you're not a man.
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Errors of knowledge are not breaches of morality; no proper moral code can demand infallibility or omniscience.
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There is only one thing that matters and that we'll remember. The rest doesn't matter. I don't care what life is to be nor what it does to us. But it won't break us. Neither you nor me. That's our only weapon. That's the only banner we can hold against all those others around us. That's all we have to know about the future.
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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.
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I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows.
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Even if smog were a risk to human life, we must remember that life in nature, without technology, is wholesale death.
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The skyline of New York is a monument of a splendor that no pyramids or palaces will ever equal or approach.
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Capitalism is the only system where such men are free to function and where progress is accompanied, not by forced privations, but by a constant rise in the general level of prosperity, of consumption and of enjoyment of life.
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Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.
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'Free competition enforced by law' is a grotesque contradiction in terms.
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Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration.