Some of my favorite Ayn Rand quotes

I recently started working my way through Ayn Rand's classic book Atlas Shrugged; and I must say I'm in love. So, I thought: "Why be selfish? Why don't I share this new found love." So that's what I'm doing. Now as a Christian, I cannot agree with everything Ayn Rand writes, but so many of her works just make sense. I hate to reduce such a profound writer to a few quotes, but I also encourage you to seek out her works and absorb them into your consciousness - they are vitally important to what is going on in the world today.

Here are a few of my favorite Rand quotables:

--"Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual)."


--"Poverty, ignorance, illness and other problems of that kind are not metaphysical emergencies. By the metaphysical nature of man and of existence, man has to maintain his life by his own effort; the values he needs—such as wealth or knowledge—are not given to him automatically, as a gift of nature, but have to be discovered and achieved by his own thinking and work."

--"The moral cannibalism of all hedonist and altruist doctrines lies in the premise that the happiness of one man necessitates the injury of another."

--"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."

--"A leash is only a rope with a noose on both ends."

--"Honor is self-esteem made visible in action."

--"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."

--"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."

--"Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion—when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing—when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors—when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you—when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice—you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that is does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot."


P.S. - This post is supposed to be a mental trojan horse. You may not realize it, but if you agree with ANY of the tenants I listed above and you voted for the current sitting president -- you need to rethink your life....

by Ben Pike