Ayn Rand (1905-1982)

Quotes

• The right to life is the source of all rights--and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave.

• A viler evil than to murder a man, is to sell him suicide as an act of virtue. A viler evil than to throw a man into a sacrificial furnace, is to demand that he leap in, of his own will, and that he build the furnace, besides.

• Learn to value yourself, which means: to fight for your happiness.

• I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

• A private individual may do anything except that which is legally forbidden; A government individual may do nothing except that which is legally permitted.

• The upper classes are... a nation's past; the middle class is its future.

• Thanksgiving is a typically American holiday...The lavish meal is a symbol of the fact that abundant consumption is the result and reward of production.

• Guilt is a rope that wears thin.

• Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values.

• The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it.

• 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.

• It is not advisable, James, to venture unsolicited opinions. You should spare yourself the embarrassing discovery of their exact value to your listener.

• I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.

• The Argument from Intimidation is a confession of intellectual impotence.

• 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.

• Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future.

• He had a big head and a face so ugly it became almost fascinating.

• 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.

• There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.

• Whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man's nature and of life's potential