Ayn Rand Quotes
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Never initiate the use of force against another man. Never let his use of force against you remain unanswered by force.
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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.
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Neither am I 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.
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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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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.
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There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.
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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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Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.
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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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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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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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By the same principle, the government may not give special leniency to the perpetrator of a crime, on the grounds of the nature of his ideas.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Errors of knowledge are not breaches of morality; no proper moral code can demand infallibility or omniscience.
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'Free competition enforced by law' is a grotesque contradiction in terms.
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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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Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration.