Quotes About Society

When the law no longer protects you from the corrupt, but protects the corrupt from you – you know your nation is doomed.

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 judgment ... is not, strictly speaking, a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang-rule.

Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another--their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.

When facing society, the man most concerned, the man who is to do the most and contribute the most, has the least to say. It's taken for granted that he has no voice and his reasons he could offer are rejected in advance as prejudiced--since no speech is ever considered, but only the speaker. It's so much easier to pass judgment on a man than an idea.

People are not embracing collectivism because they have accepted bad economics. They are accepting bad economics because they have embraced collectivism.

I don't like the thing that's happening to people, Miss Taggart. I don't know. But I've watched them here for twenty years and I've seen the change. They used to rush through here, and it was wonderful to watch, it was the hurry of men who knew where they were going and were eager to get there. Now they're hurrying because they are afraid. It's not a purpose that drives them, its fear. They're not going anywhere, they're escaping.

The concept of individual rights is so new in human history that most men have not grasped it fully to this day. In accordance with the two theories of ethics, the mystical or the social, some men assert that rights are a gift of God-- others, that rights are a gift of society. But, in fact, the source of rights is man's nature.

We are fast approaching the stage of ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission.

The right to agree with others is not a problem in any society; it is the right to disagree that is crucial.

If you see us among scores of women, will you look upon us? We shall look upon you, Liberty 5-3000, if we see you among all the women of the earth.

So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another—their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.

And what is the state but a servant and a convenience for a large number of people, just like the electric light and the plumbing system? And wouldn't it be preposterous to claim that men must exist for their plumbing, not the plumbing for the men?

Our name is Equality 7-2521, as it is written on the iron bracelet which all men wear on their left wrists with their names upon it. We are twenty-one years old. We are six feet tall, and this is a burden, for there are not many men who are six feet tall. Ever have the Teachers and the Leaders pointed to us and frowned and said: There is evil in your bones, Equality 7-2521, for your body has grown beyond the bodies of your brothers. But we cannot change our bones nor our body.

To what level of depravity has a society descended when it condemns a man simply because he is strong and great?

He demonstrated that there was no such thing as free will, since men's creative impulses were determined, as all else, by the economic structure of the epoch in which they lived.

When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, 'Who is destroying the world?' You are.

What subjectivism is in the realm of ethics, collectivism is in the realm of politics. Just as the notion that anything I do is right because I chose to do it, is not a moral principle, but a negation of morality--so the notion that anything society does is right because society chose to do it, is not a moral principle, but a negation of moral principles an the banishment of morality from social issues.

Why is it so important - what others have done? Why does it become sacred by the mere fact of not being your own? Why is anyone and everyone right - so long as it's not yourself? Why does the number of those others take the place of truth? Why is truth made a mere matter of arithmetic - and only of addition at that? Why is everything twisted out of all sense to fit everything else?

The victims are the ones who made injustice possible.

I think it's a worthy undertaking--to provide a decent apartment for a man who earns fifteen dollars a week. But not at the expense of other men. Not if it raises the taxes, raises all the other rents and makes the man who earns forty live in a rat hole.

So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate—do you hear me? no man may start—the use of physical force against others.

The laws say that men may not write unless the Council of Vocations bid them so. May we be forgiven!

there can be no justification for a society in which a man is expected to manufacture the weapons for his own murderers.

Dagny and Fransisco d'Anconia? she said, smiling ruefully, in answer to the curiosity of her friends. Oh no, it's not a romance. It's an international industrial cartel of some kind.