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
Capitalism is based on individual rights - not on the sacrifice of the individual to the 'public good' of the collective.
If a life can have a 'theme-song' - and I believe every worthwhile one has - mine is [best] expressed in one word: Individualism.
But the mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought. An agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise or an average drawn upon many individual thoughts.
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.
It is not as late as you think. It is merely early - in the age of the rebirth of individualism.
A man's rights are not violated by a private individual's refusal to deal with him.
The fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.
Capitalism is the only system that can make freedom, individuality, and the pursuit of values possible in practice.
Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.
I worship individuals for their highest possibilities as individuals and I loathe humanity for its failure to live up to these possibilities.
The freedom of speech of private individuals includes the right to not agree, not to listen, and not to finance one's own antagonists.
The secrets of this earth are not for all men to see, but only for those who will seek them.
Reality confronts man with a great many "musts," but all of them are conditional; the formula of realistic necessity is: "You must, if " and the "if" stands for man's choice
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.