Ayn Rand

The purpose of the law is not to prevent a future offense, but to punish the one actually committed.

Your soul has a single basic function-the act of valuing.

Don't consider our interests or desires. You have no duty to anyone but yourself.

A culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiate d masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.

Morally, the promise of an impossible “right” to economic security is an infamous attempt to abrogate the concept of rights. It can and does mean only one thing: a promise to enslave the men who produce, for the benefit of those who don’t.

If you want to save capitalism there is only one type of argument that you should adopt, the only one that has ever won in any moral issue: the argument from self-esteem. Check your premises, convince yourself of the rightness of your cause, then fight for capitalism with full, moral certainty.

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.

Ideas are the greatest and most crucially practical power on earth.

The only man never to be redeemed is the man without passion.

Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.

All the reasons which made the initiation of physical force evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative.

Those who grant sympathy to guilt, grant none to innocence.

Men have died in torture chambers, on the stake, in concentration camps, in front of firing squads, rather than renounce their convictions. The appeaser renounces his under the pressure of a frown on a vacant face.

Honor is self-esteem made visible in action.

People are not embracing collectivism because they have accepted bad economics. They are accepting bad economics because they have embraced collectivism.

What I want you to understand, is the full evil of those who claim to have become convinced that this earth, by its nature, is a realm of malevolence where the good has no chance to win. Let them check their premises. Let them check their standards of value. Let them check - before they grant themselves the unspeakable license of evil-as-necessity - whether they know what is the good and what are the conditions it requires.

Laissez-faire capitalism is the only social system based on the recognition of individual rights and, therefore, the only system that bans force from social relationships.

Live a life as a monument to your soul.

Man's unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself.

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.

A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.