Quotes About Ayn Rand

Every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics - a rational ethics - as a precondition of rebirth.

Ayn Rand offered perhaps the most rational solution for dealing with slanderers when she said, "Freedom comes from seeing the ignorance of your critics and discovering the emptiness of their virtue.

In a primacy-of-consciousness philosophy, virtue consists of allegiance to the ruling consciousness, such as God or society. In Ayn Rand's philosophy, virtue consists of allegiance to existence; it consists of a man's recognizing facts and then acting accordingly.

A valid code of morality, Ayn Rand concludes, a code based on reason and proper to man, must hold man's life as its standard of value. "All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys it is the evil."16

Before I met Ayn Rand, I was a logical positivist, and accordingly, I didn't believe in absolutes, moral or otherwise. If I couldn't prove a proposition with facts and figures, it was without merit.

There's an oft-used shorthand for the technologist's view of the world. It is assumed that libertarianism dominates Silicon Valley, and that isn't wholly wrong. High-profile devotees of Ayn Rand can be found there.

It is not death that we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to live.

It has been said that I am not a 'real' Libertarian. A certain faction of the Party has come to believe that the writings of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman are the holy texts of Libertarianism, and I disagree. I believe that the Libertarian movement is and should be more encompassing than the narrow-minded advocacy of economic anarchy.

'Atlas Shrugged,' let's face it, was probably the most important novel of the 20th century that was never a film.

Life is a value to be bought and thinking is the only coin noble enough to buy it.

Even if smog were a risk to human life, we must remember that life in nature, without technology, is wholesale death.

While he had once been interested in Ayn Rand, he added, he increasingly viewed her laissez-faire capitalist worldview as old thinking. Now the ideas of Buckminster Fuller—pro-technology, with a deep faith that the coming of computerization and automation would result in an infinite abundance that would arrive shortly—were increasingly appealing to him.

Every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics -- a rational ethics -- as a precondition of rebirth.

Senor d'Anconia said that you bore him, Mr. Taggart.

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

The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man's self-defense, and, as such, may only resort to force only against those who start the use of force.

Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think.

Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing buy rational actions.

Doesn't water still come up through the tap?" she asked. "Capitalism marches on, Dot. What good is free water when you can pay a hotel three dollars a bottle?" "And people are okay with this?" "Of course. America's love affair with commerce never cools." "If you tell me they're still reading Ayn Rand I may spit.

Don't try to talk anyone out of concentrating his hatred on Ayn Rand or any other dead person. It can't harm the dead. Diverted to a living person, it might actually do harm.

A government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.

When I die I hope to go to heaven--whatever that is--and I want to be able to afford the price of admission.

When you are asked to love everybody indiscriminately, that is to love people without any standard, to love them regardless of whether they have any value or virtue, you are asked to love nobody.

Have you noticed that the imbecile always smiles? Man's first frown is the first touch of God on his forehead. The touch of thought.