1Lrvsu…xNqa

Either we believe that the State exists to serve the individual or that the individual exists to serve the state.

Do not ever say that the desire to "do good" by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.

It is morally obscene to regard wealth as an anonymous, tribal product and to talk about "redistributing" it.

I do not grant the terms of reason to men who propose to deprive me of reason.

The nature of a being endowed with free will is that he is capable of both good and evil and must make the choice.

By pronouncing moral judgment, one protects the clarity of one's own perception and the rationality of the course one chooses to pursue.

It is not man's subconscious, but his conscious mind that is subject to his direct control---and to moral judgment.

It is not a man's ancestors or relatives or genes...that count in a free market, but only one human attribute: productive ability.

In order to fight any issue, it is necessary to fight for something, not merely against something.

Objectivists are fighting for that philosophical base which capitalism did not have and without which it was doomed to perish.

Capitalism and altruism are incompatible; they are philosophical opposites; they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society.

Capitalism is the only system that functions in a way which rewards rationality and penalizes all forms of irrationality, including racism.

Only those who produce, not those who consume, can ever be anybody's market.

It is only the concept of "Life" that makes the concept of "Value" possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.

To rest one's case on faith means to concede that reason is on the side of one's enemies---that one has no rational arguments to offer.

Rights are conditions of existence required by man's nature for his proper survival.

The virtue involved in helping those one loves is not "selflessness" or "sacrifice," but integrity.

An honest man does not desire until he has identified the object of his desire.

If you do not fight for your own ideas, you have no right to blame the ideas of others, nor to complain.

Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others.

No action could be lower or more futile than for one person to throw upon another the burden of his abdication of choice.

Inflation is not caused by the actions of private citizens, but by the government: by deficit spending.

I win by means of nothing but logic and I surrender to nothing but logic.

Evil, not value, is an absence and a negation; evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from us.

A right does not include the material implementation of that right by other men.

The social recognition of the connection between man's survival and his use of reason is the concept of individual rights.

A rational mind does not sacrifice its knowledge, its view of the truth, to anyone's opinions, threats, wishes, plans, or "welfare".

There is only one institution that can arrogate to itself the power legally to trade by means of rubber checks: the government.

Moral values are the motive power of a man's actions.

Your emotions are estimates of that which furthers your life or threatens it, lightning calculators giving you a sum of your profit or loss.