Ayn Rand Quotes.
We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality
Upper classes are a nation’s past; the middle class is its future.
We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.
If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.
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.
Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).
To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one’s thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one’s mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.
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.
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.
Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice.
A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.
Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth, the man who would make his fortune no matter where he started.
Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.
Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision.
The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.
The only power any 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.
The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
