Ayn Rand Quotes

Ayn Rand is a Genius, she is a fierce individual with a passion for writing a good novel. She wrote very interesting novels as well as some great other books on various subjects, among them are... The Virtue of Selfishness, Anthem, Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead. Here are some valuable quotes from her collection of writings....

"Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification"

"I swear by my life, and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."

"So you think that money is the root of all evil? Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?"

"Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason"

"Love is our response to our highest values."

"If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose- because it contains all the others- the fact that they were the people who created the phrase to make money. No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity- to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created."

"In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it's yours."

"Existence exists—and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists."

"Whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man's nature and of life's potential."


"I am a man who does not exist for others.
...the person who loves everybody and feels at home everywhere is the true hater of mankind. He expects nothing of men, so no form of depravity can outrage him.
I have come here to say that I do not recognize anyone's right to one minute of my life.... It had to be said. The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing."

"Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. Their goals differed, but they all had this in common: that the step was first, the road new, the vision unborrowed, and the response they received--hatred. The great creators--the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors--stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new thought was opposed. Every great new invention was denounced. The first motor was considered foolish. The first airplane was considered impossible. The power loom was considered vicious. Anesthesia was considered sinful. But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered and they paid. But they won."

"And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride. This god, this one word: 'I.' "

"There is no such thing as duty. If you know that a thing is right, you want to do it. If you don't want to do it--it isn't right. If it's right and you don't want to do it--you don't know what right is and you're not a man."

"I can say — not as a patriotic bromide, but with full knowledge of the necessary metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, political, and aesthetic roots — that the United States of America is the greatest, the noblest and, in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world."

“I shall choose friends among men, but neither slaves nor masters. And I shall choose only such as please me, and them I shall love and respect, but neither command nor obey. And we shall join our hands when we wish, or walk alone when we so desire. “

“The conservatives see man as a body freely roaming the earth, building sand piles or factories—with an electronic computer inside his skull, controlled from Washington. The liberals see man as a soul freewheeling to the farthest reaches of the universe—but wearing chains from nose to toes when he crosses the street to buy a loaf of bread.”

“The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.”

“In a capitalist society, all human relationships are voluntary. Men are free to cooperate or not, to deal with one another or not, as their own individual judgments, convictions and interests dictate.”

“Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman's tool is values; the bureaucrat's tool is fear.”

“Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others.”

“Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation's troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen.”

“America's abundance was created not 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. They did not starve the people to pay for America's industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages, and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance- and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way.”

collectivism kills

"Racism is simply an ugly form of collectivism, the mindset that views humans strictly as groups rathar than individuals..."
-Ron Paul

Hope For Humanity

Hope for Humanity
It is clear that at the heart of Obama’s belief in policy, stands a bold dedication to creating a collectivist society. His naïve ideology of altruism is expressed in the form of rhetorical speeches that inspire people in the most unusual way. Denouncing the rich and punishing achievement have become overwhelmingly popular, and it terrifies me even more to know that our president endorses the idea.

“We reward people a lot for being rich, for being famous, for being cute, for
being thin… one of the values I think we need to instill in our country, in
our children, is a sense of ‘usefulness’, in other words, are we useful,
are we making other peoples’ lives a little bit better?”
- Barack Obama

The progressive income tax system currently in place, put there by people who
think like Obama, contradicts this statement to the max. With capital gains
taxes rising and government intervention on a never ending run, we see nothing
but punishment given to the rich. This quote reveals an opinion about how Obama
sees the rich, and that he views social service as a much more important value
than self-interest. Although, clearly self-interest is the vehicle in which all
beings travel to stay alive. If one wasn’t self-interested he would not bother
to go out of his way to kill the poor fish for which he would eat for dinner in
order to get the nutrition he needs to stay alive. Furthermore, if I was
stripped of all self-interest, would I not also be stripped of any will to live?
Essentially what Obama is saying, is that your “usefulness” to society is more
important than your life itself. But without an individual life, there is
no society.

Is it possible that Obama has never learned to draw the distinction between hard
work and a life of living off his income from serving others? Have his
early “organizing” days made it possible for him to live off of donations from
others rather than from his own production? Is it possible that all his
life he has avoided doing anything truly
productive?
It is a sad truth that today most politicians are put into leadership roles
in the worst of all ways. They start out by focusing on collective goals and
organizing people around a movement that has an ideological base. They learn
what it takes to convince people that they actually care about them, but they do
not produce valuable goods or protection to society as a whole. They
appeal to altruism and inspire short circuit minds to vote for political
“change”; the kind of change which emulates Robin Hood, finding enemies of the
people and convincing the people that we must fight these enemies. Most
often these enemies are rich individuals who have accomplished productive
careers.
Obama and many other dictators of the past have had to gain their
power through agitation. They invent an atrocity and then convince the “poor”
that they have been unfairly treated. First, he assumes that business
enterprises don’t belong to the business owners or “big corporations”; they
belong to the people and the “big corporations” have robbed the people of their
ability to make a living by keeping their profits rather than investing them in
people. This justifies “protections” for the workers that cannot be
implemented if the workers are not productive or if other conditions change in
the marketplace. These imposed “protections” are nothing more than the
meddling of a person who has no idea what it takes to run a corporation.
The
truth is that none of Obama’s tactics, economic policies or even his hope for a
better future, can make every American’s dream possible. Obama creates
nothing, produces nothing and can only use the power of government to manipulate
business enterprises by means of forcing them to tow the government line.
But these businesses must already be productive before any of Obama’s hopes can
be realized. It will not be Obama who will make them successful but hard
working business owners and productive employees. In fact, the only thing
that can make every American’s dream possible is a market free of the
manipulations of people like Obama.Too often people fail to understand that
before one must become rich, one must first organize resources and actually
perform work. Too often people give in to emotions and fill themselves with
hatred for no reason. We must resist the hatred we feel towards others who have
performed and accomplished. We must remember that ours is the one society
in history that established the freedom that creates the opportunity to become
rich. We need to stop this ever growing bias towards wealthy individuals, which
is promoted by a welfare state ready to be empowered. We must abandon the idea
that government can grant us our every wish, and we must analyze the parts of
history in which people lost hope and looked to the government for answers.
We must abandon the idea that government is the source of wealth and can
make anything happen with the push of a button, because this idea has provided
innumerable excuses for foreign dictators. We must take the hope that
Obama wants everyone to invest in the government, and invest that hope in
something that is more likely to return. We must invest that hope into
ourselves, as individuals of a free society. And until we do this we will
continue to drag the chains of self-sacrifice and forced altruism.