Ayn Rand - Quotes 301-393
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
