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.
Every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics - a rational ethics - as a precondition of rebirth.
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.
Man's unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself.
There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism - by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide.Collection: Suicide
A businessman cannot force you to buy his product; if he makes a mistake, he suffers the consequences; if he fails, he takes the loss. If bureaucrat makes a mistake, you suffer the consequences; if he fails, he passes the loss on to you.Collection: Mistake
When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion - when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed.Collection: Honesty
Whoever defends his own rights defends the rights of all.Collection: Rights
We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading realityCollection: Reality
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.Collection: Government
The government was set to protect man from criminals-and the constitution was written to protect man from the government. The Bill of Rights was not directed at private citizens, but against the government-as an explicit declaration that individual rights supersede any public or social power.Collection: Men
Do not keep silent when your own ideas and values are being attacked. If a dictatorship ever comes to this country, it will be by the fault of those who keep silent. We are still free enough to speak. Do we have time? No one can tell.Collection: Country
The difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is a matter of time.Collection: Differences
When you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice, you may know that your society is doomedCollection: Honesty
The majority of those who are loosely identified by the term 'liberals' are afraid to let themselves discover that what they advocate is statism. They want to keep all the advantages and effects of capitalism, while destroying the cause, and they want to establish statism without its necessary effects. They do not want to know or to admit that they are the champions of dictatorship and slavery.Collection: Champion
Identify the dominant philosophy of a society and you can predict its future.Collection: Philosophy
Freedom (n.): To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Greed
Everyone has the right to make his own decisions, but none has the right to force his decision on others.Collection: Decision
I am not morally obligated to care more for a man than he cares for himself.Collection: Men
An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.Collection: Honesty
The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow.Collection: Liberty
We are born into this world unarmed - our mind is our only weapon.Collection: Mind
Whoever claims the right to redistribute the wealth produced by others is claiming the right to treat human beings as chattel.Collection: Money
Man's basic vice, the source of all his evils, is the act of unfocusing his mind, the suspension of his consciousness, which is not blindness, but the refusal to see, not ignorance, but the refusal to know.Collection: Ignorance
Do not set out to write with your eyes on the box office. It can't be done.Collection: Writing
I do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and I do not live in chronic dread of disaster. It is no happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that I regard as the abnormal exception in Human Life.Collection: Fate
My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists - and in a single choice: to live.Collection: Choices
Don't bother to examine a folly-ask yourself only what it accomplishes.Collection: Accomplish
but their eyes were as cold blue glass buttons.Collection: Eye
That love is reverence, and worship, and glory, and the upward glance. Not a bandage for dirty sores. But they don’t know it. Those who speak of love most promiscuously are the ones who’ve never felt it. They make some sort of feeble stew out of sympathy, compassion, contempt, and general indifference, and they call it love. Once you’ve felt what it means to love as you and I know it – the total passion for the total height – you’re incapable of anything less.Collection: Love
Your eyes are as a flame, but our brothers have neither hope nor fire. Your mouth is cut of granite, but our brothers are soft and humble. Your head is high, but our brothers cringe. You walk, but our brothers crawl. We wish to be damned with you, rather than blessed with all our brothers. Do as you please with us, but do not send us away from you.Collection: Brother
There is fear hanging in the air of the sleeping halls, and the air of the streets. Fear walks through the city, fear without name, without shape. All men feel it and none dare speak.Collection: Fear
We'll meet again. We'll meet when years have passed, and years make such a difference, don't they?Collection: Years
When I listen to a symphony I love, I don't get from it what the composer got. His 'Yes' was different from mine. He could have no concern for mine and no exact conception of it. That answer is too personal to each man. But in giving himself what he wanted, he gave me a great experience.Collection: Men
They talked about nothing in particular, sentences that had meaning only in the sound of the voices, in warm gaiety, in the ease of complete relaxation.Collection: Voice
She's a writer. The kind of writer who wouldn't be published outside. She believes that when one deals with words, one deals with the mind.Collection: Believe
It's such a waste to be subtle and vicious with people who don't even know that you're being subtle and viciousCollection: People
It is my eyes which see, and the sight of my eyes grants beauty to the earth. It is my ears which hear, and the hearing of my ears gives its song to the world. It is my mind which thinks, and the judgement of my mind is the only searchlight that can find the truth. It is my will which chooses, and the choice of my will is the only edict I must respect.Collection: Song
That time and those people are upon you!Collection: Time
Some day, the world will discover that, without thought, there can be no love.Collection: Love
What I am fighting is the idea that charity is a moral duty and a primary virtue.Collection: Fighting
What objectivity and the study of philosophy requires is not an 'open mind,' but an active mind - a mind able and eagerly willing to examine ideas, but to examine them criticially.Collection: Philosophy
Pleasure is nought but virtue's gayer name-- I wrong her still, I rate her worth too low: Virtue the root, and pleasure is the flow'r.Collection: Names
There is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Real
p.61 He [Roark] was usually disliked, from the first sight of his face, anywhere he went. His face was closed like the door of a safety vault; things locked in safety vaults are valuable; men did not care to feel that. He was a cold, disquieting presence in the room; his presence had a strange quality: it made itself felt and yet it made them feel that he was not there; or perhaps that he was and they weren't.Collection: Men
If you tell an amateur that his story is not good, he always declares indignantly: 'Oh, but it really happened just like this!' The writer who doesn't understand that this is beside the point is not a writer at all.Collection: Stories
Patience is always rewarded and romance is always round the corner!Collection: Inspirational