Quotes About Individualism

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.

Don't set out to raze all shrines, you'll frighten men. enshrine mediocrity-and the shrines are razed.

If any part of your uncertainty is a conflict between your heart and your mind—follow your mind.

We alone, of the thousands who walk this earth, we alone in this hour are doing a work which has no purpose save that we wish to do it.

I had been opposed to the practice of dedicating books; I had held that a book is addressed to any reader who proves worthy of it.

Do not consider Collectivists as sincere but deluded idealists. The proposal to enslave some men for the sake of others is not an ideal; brutality is not idealistic, no matter what its purpose. Do not ever say that the desire to do good by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.

Man is an end in himself.

You'd let the whole world perish rather than soil that immaculate self of yours with a single spot of which you'd have to be ashamed.

A right doesn't include the material implementation of that right by other men; it includes only the freedom to earn that implementation by one's own effort.

It was a long story and the spirt which moved it was the spirit of man's freedom. But what is freedom? Freedom from what? 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. that is freedom. This and nothing else. ~Equality 7-2521 (as Prometheus), pg 101

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.

A man of self respect doesn't turn into a milch cow for anybody.

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.

The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.

If one doesn't respect oneself one can have neither love nor respect for others.

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?

The basic cause of totalitarianism is two ideas: men's rejection of reason in favor of faith, and of self-interest in favor of self-sacrifice. If

And we know well that there is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone.

I don't want to fight for the people, I don't want to fight against the people, I don't want to hear of the people. I want to be left alone—to live.

The sacred word: EGO

When men reject reason, they have no means left for dealing with one another — except brute, physical force.

I want to be prepared to claim the greatest virtue of all - that I was a man who made money

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.