Ayn Rand - Quotes 101-200
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
