The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me.
Ayn Rand |
The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
Ayn Rand |
The truth is not for all men, but only for those who seek it.
Ayn Rand |
The worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt.
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 |
There can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions to an individual, but permitted to a mob.
Ayn Rand |
There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.
Ayn Rand |
Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision.
Ayn Rand |
To achieve, you need thought. You have to know what you are doing and that's real power.
Ayn Rand |
To say 'I love you' one must first be able to say the 'I.'
Ayn Rand |
Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future.
Ayn Rand |
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.
Ayn Rand |
Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think.
Ayn Rand |
When I die, I hope to go to Heaven, whatever the Hell that is.
Ayn Rand |
When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is learning to understand and control the behavior of crop plants and domestic animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized.
Ayn Rand |
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).
Ayn Rand |
Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.
Ayn Rand |
It only stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.
Ayn Rand |
Just as man can't exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one's rights into reality, to think, to work and keep the results, which means: the right of property.
Ayn Rand |
Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.
Ayn Rand |
Man's unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself.
Ayn Rand |
Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason.
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 |
Money is the barometer of a society's virtue.
Ayn Rand |
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.
Ayn Rand |
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.
Ayn Rand |
Potentially, 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 |
Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone.
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 |
So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of all money?
Ayn Rand |
The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see.
Ayn Rand |
The ladder of success is best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity.
Ayn Rand |
The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap.
Ayn Rand |
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.
Ayn Rand |
The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.
Ayn Rand |
