Ayn Rand quotes - page 4

In a capitalist society, all human relationships are voluntary. Men are free to cooperate or not, to deal with one another or not, as their own individual judgments, convictions and interests dictate. (Ayn Rand)
Even if smog were a risk to human life, we must remember that life in nature, without technology, is wholesale death. View quote
Ayn Rand
All the reasons which made the initiation of physical force evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative. View quote
Ayn Rand
Civilization is the process of setting man free from men. View quote
Ayn Rand
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. View quote
Ayn Rand
Honor is self-esteem made visible in action. View quote
Ayn Rand
But there are people who'll try to hurt you through the good they see in you--knowing that it's the good, needing it and punishing you for it. Don't let it break you when you discover that. View quote
Ayn Rand
Ask yourself why totalitarian dictatorships find it necessary to pour money and effort into propaganda for their own helpless, chained, gagged slaves, who have no means of protest or defense. The answer is that even the humblest peasant or the lowest savage would rise in blind rebellion, were he to realize that he is being immolated, not to some incomprehensible noble purpose, but to plain, naked human evil. View quote
Ayn Rand
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. View quote
Ayn Rand
Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed. View quote
Ayn Rand
Contrary to the ecologists, nature does not stand still and does not maintain the kind of equilibrium that guarantees the survival of any particular species - least of all the survival of her greatest and most fragile product: man. (Ayn Rand)
Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins. View quote
Ayn Rand
Never think of pain or danger or enemies a moment longer than is necessary to fight them. View quote
Ayn Rand
I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle. View quote
Ayn Rand
The skyline of New York is a monument of a splendour that no pyramids or palaces will ever equal or approach. View quote
Ayn Rand
Man's rights can be violated only by the use of physical force. It is only by means of physical force that one man can deprive another of his life, or enslave him, or rob him, or prevent him from pursuing his own goals, or compel him to act against his own rational judgment. View quote
Ayn Rand
The secret dread of modern intellectuals, liberals and conservatives alike, the unadmitted terror at the root of their anxiety, which all of their current irrationalities are intended to stave off and to disguise, is the unstated knowledge that Soviet Russia [was] the full, actual, literal, consistent embodiment of the morality of altruism, that Stalin did not corrupt a noble ideal, that this is the only way altruism has to be or can ever be practiced. View quote
Ayn Rand
Aristotle may be regarded as the cultural barometer of Western history. Whenever his influence dominated the scene, it paved the way for one of history's brilliant eras; whenever it fell, so did mankind. View quote
Ayn Rand
Genius is an exaggeration of dimension. So is elephantiasis. Both may be only a disease. View quote
Ayn Rand
Thousands of years ago the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burnt at the stake he'd taught his brothers to light, but he left them a gift they had not conceived and he lifted darkness from the face of the Earth. View quote
Ayn Rand
Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration. (Ayn Rand)
The quickest way to kill the human spirit is to ask someone to do mediocre work. View quote
Ayn Rand
You have been the one encounter in my life that can never be repeated. View quote
Ayn Rand
A culture is made - or destroyed - by its articulate voices. View quote
Ayn Rand
I do not seek the good of others as a sanction for my right to exist, nor do I recognize the good of others as a justification for their seizure of my property or their destruction of my life. View quote
Ayn Rand