Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand
Ayn Randwas a Russian-born American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter. She is known for her two best-selling novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and for developing a philosophical system she called Objectivism. Educated in Russia, she moved to the United States in 1926. She had a play produced on Broadway in 1935–1936. After two early novels that were initially unsuccessful in America, she achieved fame with her 1943 novel, The Fountainhead...
NationalityRussian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth2 February 1905
CitySaint Petersburg, Russia
CountryRussian Federation
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.
Government control of the economy, no matter in whose behalf, has been the source of all the evils in our industrial society -- and the solution is laissez-faire capitalism, i.e., the abolition of any and all forms of intervention in production and trade, the separation of State and Economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of Church and State.
If a businessman makes a mistake, he suffers the consequences. If a bureaucrat makes a mistake, you suffer the consequences.
America's abundance was not created by public sacrifices to "the common good", but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes
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.
There was no such person as Mrs. Wayne Wilmot; there was only a shell containing the opinions of her friends, the picture postcards she had seen, the novels of country squires she had read
That which you see is the first thing to disbelieve
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.
There can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions to an individual, but permitted to a mob.
Under fascism, citizens retain the responsibilities of owning property, without freedom to act and without any of the advantages of ownership. Under socialism, government officials acquire all the advantages of ownership, without any of the responsibilities, since they do not hold title to the property, but merely the right to use it -- at least until the next purge. In either case, the government officials hold the economic, political and legal power of life or death over the citizens.
Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind, and a step that travels unlimited roads.
There can be no compromise on basic principles. There can be no compromise on moral issues. There can be no compromise on matters of knowledge, of truth, of rational conviction.
Any group or "collective," large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members. In a free society, the "rights" of any group are derived from the rights of its members through their voluntary individual choice and contractual agreement, and are merely the application of these individual rights to a specific undertaking... A group, as such, has no rights.
If an uncompromising stand is to be smeared as 'extremism,' then that smear is directed at any devotion to values, any loyalty to principles, any profound conviction, any consistency, any steadfastness, any passion, any dedication to an unbreached, inviolate truth -- any man of integrity.