Ayn Rand

You seek escape from pain. We seek the achievement of happiness. You exist for the sake of avoiding punishment. We exist for the sake of earning rewards. Threats will not make us function; fear is not our incentive. It is not death that we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to live. You, who have lost the concept of the difference, you who claim that fear and joy are incentives of equal power—and secretly add that fear is the more “practical”—you do not wish to live, and only fear of death still holds you to the existence you have damned.

Look around you: what you have done to society, you have done it first within your soul; one is the image of the other. This dismal wreckage, which is now your world, is the physical form of the treason you committed to your values, to your friends, to your defenders, to your future, to your country, to yourself.

We will rebuild America’s system on the moral premise which had been its foundation, but which you treated as a guilty underground, in your frantic evasion of the conflict between that premise and your mystic morality: the premise that man is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others, that man’s life, his freedom, his happiness are his by inalienable right.

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.

In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.

The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive- a definition that invalidates man's consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence. Man's mind, say the mystics of spirit, must be subordinated to the will of God. Man's standard of value, say the mystics of spirit, is the pleasure of God, whose standards are beyond man's power of comprehension and must be accepted on faith. The purpose of man's life is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question.

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

The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it

For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbors - between those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it.

Love is our response to our highest values.

Through centuries of scourges and disasters, brought about by your code of morality, you have cried that your code had been broken, that the scourges were punishment for breaking it, that men were too weak and too selfish to spill all the blood it required. You damned men, you damned existence, you damned this earth, but never dared to question your code. Your victims took the blame and struggled on, with your curses as reward for their martyrdom - while you went on crying that your code was noble, but human nature was not good enough to practice it. And no one rose to ask the question: Good? - by what standard?

Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.

I refuse to accept as guilt the fact of my own existence.

“Every dictator is a mystic, and every mystic is a potential dictator. A mystic craves obedience from men, not their agreement. He wants them to surrender their consciousness to his assertions, his edicts, his wishes, his whims - as his consciousness is surrendered to theirs. He wants to deal with men by means of faith and force - he finds no satisfaction in their consent if he must earn it by means of facts and reason. Reason is the enemy he dreads and, simultaneously, considers precarious: reason, to him, is a means of deception, he feels that men possess some power more potent than reason - and only their causeless belief or their forced obedience can give him a sense of security, a proof that he has gained control of the mystic endowment he lacked. His lust is to command, not to convince: conviction requires an act of independence and press on the absolute of an objective reality. What he seeks is power over reality and over men’s means of perceiving it, their mind, the power to interpose his will between existence and consciousness, as if, by agreeing to fake the reality he orders them to fake, men would, in fact, create it."

“No matter whose welfare he professes to serve, be it the welfare of God or of that disembodied gargoyle he describes as ‘The People,’ no matter what ideal he proclaims in terms of some supernatural dimension - in fact, in reality, on earth, his ideal is death, his craving is to kill, his only satisfaction is to torture."

“Destruction is the only end that the mystics’ creed has ever achieved, as it is the only end that, you see them achieving today, and if the ravages wrought by their acts have not made them question their doctrines, if they profess to be moved by love, yet are not deterred by piles of human corpses, it is because the truth about their souls is worse than the obscene excuse you have allowed them, the excuse that the end justifies the means and that the horrors they practice are means to nobler ends. The truth is that those horrors are their ends."

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.

My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.

"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. When there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws."

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.

To say 'I love you' one must know first how to say the 'I.'

It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there's someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.

What’s the most horrible experience you can imagine? To me- it’s being left, unarmed, in a sealed cell with a drooling beast of prey or a maniac who’s has some disease that’s eaten his brain out. You’d have nothing but your own voice- your voice and your thought. You’d scream to that creature why it should not touch you, you’d have the most eloquent words, the unanswerable words, you’d become the vessel of the absolute truth. And you’d see living eyes watching you and you’d know that the thing can’t hear you, that it can’t be reached, not reached, not in any way, yet it’s breathing and moving there before you with a purpose of its own. That’s horror. Well, that’s what’s hanging over the world, prowling somewhere through mankind, that same thing, something closed, mindless, utterly wanton, but something with an aim and cunning of it’s own.

I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.

Neither am I the means to any end others may wish to accomplish. I am not a tool for their use. I am not a servant of their needs. I am not a bandage for their wounds, I am not a sacrifice on their altars.

There is nothing to take a man's freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers

This miracle of me is mine to own and keep, and mine to guard, and mine to use, and mine to kneel before...The fortune of my spirit is not to be blown into coins of brass and flung to the winds as alms for the poor of spirit.

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.

Do you believe in God, Andrei? No. Neither do I. But that's a favorite question of mine. An upside-down question, you know. What do you mean? Well, if I asked people whether they believed in life, they'd never understand what I meant. It's a bad question. It can mean so much that it really means nothing. So I ask them if they believe in God. And if they say they do—then, I know they don't believe in life. Why? Because, you see, God—whatever anyone chooses to call God—is one's highest conception of the highest possible. And whoever places his highest conception above his own possibility thinks very little of himself and his life. It's a rare gift, you know, to feel reverence for your own life and to want the best, the greatest, the highest possible, here, now, for your very own. To imagine a heaven and then not to dream of it, but to demand it.

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.

When the common good of a society is regarded as something apart from and superior to the individual good of its members, it means that the good of some men takes precedence over the good of others, with those others consigned to the status of sacrificial animals.

It is futile to fight against, if one does not know what one is fighting for.

When I say “capitalism,” I mean a full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism—with a separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.

Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.

Ask yourself why totalitarian dictatorships find it necessary to pour money and effort into propaganda for their own helpless, chained, gagged slaves, who have no means of protest or defense. The answer is that even the humblest peasant or the lowest savage would rise in blind rebellion, were he to realize that he is being immolated, not to some incomprehensible noble purpose, but to plain, naked human evil.

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).

Every coercive monopoly was created by government intervention into the economy: by special privileges, such as franchises or subsidies, which closed the entry of competitors into a given field, by legislative action.

A crime is the violation of the right(s) of other men by force (or fraud). It is only the initiation of physical force against others- i.e., the recourse to violence- that can be classified as a crime in a free society (as distinguished from a civil wrong). Ideas, in a free society, are not a crime- and neither can they serve as the justification of a crime.

One of the paradoxes of our age is the fact that the intellectuals, the politicians, and all the sundry voices that choke like asthma the throat of our communications media, have never gasped and stuttered so loudly about their devotion to the public good, and about the people's will as the supreme criterion of value - and never have they been so grossly indifferent to the people. The reason, obviously, is that collectivist slogans serve as the rationalization for those who intend, not to follow the people, but to rule them.

Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration.

An artist reveals his naked soul in his work - and so, gentle reader, do you when you respond to it.

Man—every man—is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others; he must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; he must work for his rational self-interest, with the achievement of his own happiness as the highest moral purpose of his life. 

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 an 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.

-Ayn Rand-

 

There can be no compromise between a property owner and a burglar; offering the burglar a single teaspoon of one's silverware would not be a compromise but a total surrender- the recognition of his right to one's property. What value or concession did the burglar offer in return? And once the principle of unilateral concessions is accepted as the base of a relationship by both parties, it is only a matter of time before the burglar would seize the rest. As an example of this process, observe the present foreign policy of the United States.

There can be no compromise between freedom and government controls; to accept "just a few controls" is to surrender the principle of inalienable individual rights and to substitute for it the principle of the government's unlimited, arbitrary power, thus delivering oneself into gradual enslavement. As an example of this process, observe the present domestic policy of the United States.

-Ayn Rand- The Virtue of Selfishness: 7 Doesn't Life Require Compromise?

Ask yourself why totalitarian dictatorships find it necessary to pour money and effort into propaganda for their own helpless, chained, gagged slaves who have no means of protest or defense. The answer is that even the humblest peasant or the lowest savage would rise in blind rebellion, were he to realize that he is being immolated, not to some incomprehensible "noble purpose" , but to plain, naked human evil.

-Ayn Rand- The Virtue of Selfishness-8 Rational Life in an Irrational Society?

Any undertaking that involves more than one man, requires the voluntary consent of every participant. Every one of them has the right to make his own decision, but none has the right to force his decision on the others....

Remember that rights are moral principles which define and protect a mans freedom of action, but impose no obligations on other men. Private citizens are not a threat to one another's rights or freedom. A private citizen who resorts to physical force and violiates the rights of others is a criminal, and men have legal protection against him.

Criminals are a small minority in any age or country. And the harm they have done to mankind is infinitesimal  when compared to the horrors, the bloodshed, the wars, persecutions, confiscations, famines, enslavements, and whole-sale destructions perpetuated by mankind's governments. Potentially, a government is the most dangerous threat to mans rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims. When unlimited and unrestricted by individual rights, a government is men's deadliest enemy. it is not as protection against private actions, but against governmental actions that the Bill of Rights was written.

-Ayn Rand- The Virtue of Selfishness-12 mans rights

Just as a man can evade reality and act on the blind whim of any given moment, but can achieve nothing save progressive self destruction, so a society can evade reality and establish a system ruled by the blind whims of its members or its leader, by the majority gang of any given moment, by the current demagogue or by a permanent dictator. But such a society can achieve nothing save the rule of brute force and a state of progressive self-destruction.

-Ayn Rand- The Virtue of Selfishness-13 Collectivized "Rights"

Any group or collective large or small is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the individual rights of its members, in a free society the rights of any group are derived from the rights of its members through voluntary, individual choice and contractual agreement, and are merely the application of these individual rights to a specific undertaking. Every legitimate group undertaking is based on the participants right of free association and free trade.

-Ayn Rand- The Virtue of Selfishness-13 Collectivized "Rights"

The notion of "collective rights" means that rights belong to some men and not to others, that some men have the "right" to dispose of others in any manner they please, and that the criterion of such privileged position consists of numerical superiority. Nothing can ever justify or validate such a doctrine, and no one ever has. Like the altruist morality from which it is derived, this doctrine rests on mysticism: either the old fashioned mysticism of faith in supernatural edicts like the "Divine Right" of kings or on the social mystique of modern collectivists who see society as a super-organism, some supernatural entity apart from and superior to the sum of its individual members.

Ayn Rand- The Virtue of Selfishness- 13

A nation that violates the rights of its own citizens cannot claim any rights whatsoever....neither geography, race, tradition, or previous state of developement can confer on some human beings the "right" to violate the rights of others.

Ayn Rand-TVoS-13

A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort, or enslaves him, or attempts to limit the freedom of his mind, or compels him to act against his own rational judgement, a society that sets up a conflict between his edicts and the requirements of mans nature, is not strictly speaking a society but a mob held together by institutionalized gang-rule. Such a society destroys all the values of human co-existance, has no possible justification and represents not only a scource of benifits, but the deadliest threat to mans survival.

-Ayn Rand-TVS-14 The Nature of Government

Man's rights can be violated only by the use of physical force. It is only by means of physical force that one man can deprive another of his life, or enslave him, rob him, or prevent him from pursuing his own goals, or compel him to act against his own rational judgement.
Ayn Rand- TVS-14 The Nature of Government

In a civilized society force may be used only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. All the reasons which make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative.
The Nature of Government

Now consider the extent of the moral and political inversion in todays prevalent view of government. Instead of being a protector of mans rights, the government is becoming their most dangerous violator. Instead of guarding freedom the government is establishing slavery. Instead of protecting men from the initiators of physical force, the government is initiating physical force and cohersion in any manner and issue it pleases. Instead of serving as the instrument of objectivity in human relationships, the government is creating a deadly, subterranean reign of uncertainty and fear by means of non-objective laws whose interpretation is left to the arbitrary decisions of random bureaucrats. Instead of protecting men from injury by whim, the government is arrogating to itself the power of unlimited whim, so that we are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.
Ayn Rand-The Nature of Government

In a fully free society taxation (payments for governmental services) would be volunatary...
The principle of voluntary government financing rests on the following premise: The government is not the owner of the citizens income and therefore cannot hold a blank check on that income. The nature of the proper governmental services must be constitutionally defined and de-limited, leaving the government no power to enlarge the scope of its services at its own arbitrary discretion. It regards the government as the servant, not the ruler of its citizens, as an agent who must be paid for its services, not as a benefactor whose services are gratuitous, who dispenses something for nothing.
Ayn Rand-Government Financing in a Free Society