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
Unjust laws have to be fought ideologically; they cannot be fought or corrected by means of mere disobedience and futile martyrdom.
No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the sum of his knowledge.
Men have been taught that it is a virtue to stand together. But the creator is the man who stands alone.
Ideas, in a free society, are not a crime- and neither can they serve as the justification of a crime.
To discuss evil in a manner implying neutrality, is to sanction it.
To know one's own desires, their meaning and their costs requires the highest human virtue: rationality.
The moral justification of capitalism does not lie in the altruist claim that it represents the best way to achieve 'the common good.' It is true that capitalism does -- if that catch-phrase has any meaning -- but this is merely a secondary consequence. The moral justification for capitalism lies in the fact that it is the only system consonant with man's rational nature, that it protects man's survival qua man, and that its ruling principle is: justice
Capitalism is not the system of the past; it is the system of the future -- if mankind is to have a future
The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life.
Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.
Capitalism was the only system in history where wealth was not acquired by looting, but by production, not by force, but by trade, the only system that stood for man's right to his own mind, to his work, to his life, to his happiness, to himself.
Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it.
When a man attempts to deal with me by force, I answer him, by force.
The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, and to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law.