Ayn Rand - Force Quotes

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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.

Ayn Rand
Whoever, to whatever purpose or extent, initiates the use of force, is a killer acting on the premise of death in a manner wider than murder: the premise of destroying man's capacity to live.

Ayn Rand
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.

Ayn Rand
No advocate of reason can claim the right to force his ideas on others. No advocate of the free mind can claim the right to force the minds of others. No rational society, no co-operation, no agreement, no understanding, no discussion are possible among men who propose to substitute guns for rational persuasion.

Ayn Rand
For they have nothing to fight me with, save the brute force of their numbers. I have my mind.

Ayn Rand
Do not open your mouth to tell me that your mind has convinced you of your right to force my mind. Force and mind are opposites. Morality ends where a gun begins.

Ayn Rand
Collectivism answers: The power of society is unlimited. Society may make any laws it wishes, and force them upon anyone in any manner it wishes.

Ayn Rand
Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where the gun begins.

Ayn Rand
A BUSINESSMAN cannot force you to buy his product; if he makes a mistake, He suffers the consequences; if he fails, he takes the loss.
A bureaucrat, forces you to obey his decisions, whether you agree with him or not... If he makes a mistake, you suffer the consequences; If he fails, He passes the loss on to you, in the form of heavier taxes.

Ayn Rand
There are only two means by which men can deal with one another: guns or logic. Force or persuasion. Those who know that they cannot win by means of logic, have always resorted to guns.

Ayn Rand
If men want to oppose war, it is statism that they must oppose. So long as they hold the tribal notion that the individual is sacrificial fodder for the collective, that some men have the right to rule others by force, and that some (any) alleged good can justify it-there can be no peace within a nation and no peace among nations.

Ayn Rand
Collectivism holds that the individual has no rights, that his life and work belong to the group (to "society," to the tribe, the state, the nation) and that the group may sacrifice him at its own whim to its own interests. The only way to implement a doctrine of that kind is by means of brute force - and statism has always been the poltical corollary of collectivism.

Ayn Rand
All the reasons which made the initiation of physical force evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative.

Ayn Rand
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.

Ayn Rand
The men who attempt to survive, not by means of reason, but by means of force, are attempting to survive by the method of animals.

Ayn Rand
To deal with men by force is as impractical as to deal with nature by persuasion.

Ayn Rand
There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism - by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide.

Ayn Rand
Never initiate the use of force against another man. Never let his use of force against you remain unanswered by force.

Ayn Rand
When you force a man to act against his own choice and judgment, it's his thinking that you want him to suspend.

Ayn Rand
An attempt to achieve the good by force is like an attempt to provide a man with a picture gallery at the price of cutting out his eyes.

Ayn Rand
So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate the use of physical force against others.... When a man attempts to deal with me by force, I answer him by force. It is only as retaliation that force may be used and only against the man who starts its use. No, I do not share his evil or sink to his concept of morality: I merely grant him his choice, destruction, the only destruction he had the right to choose: his own.

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

Ayn Rand
Volumes can be and have been written about the issue of freedom versus dictatorship, but, in essence, it comes down to a single question: do you consider it moral to treat men as sacrificial animals and to rule them by physical force?

Ayn Rand
Faith and force... are corollaries: every period of history dominated by mysticism, was a period of statism, of dictatorship, of tyranny.

Ayn Rand
I like to think of fire held in a man's hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what great things have come from such hours. When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind—and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression.

Ayn Rand
Potentially, 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.

Ayn Rand
To interpose the threat of physical destruction between a man and his perception of reality, is to negate and paralyze his means of survival to force him to act against his own judgment, is like forcing him to act against his own sight

Ayn Rand
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, or rob him, or prevent him from pursuing his own goals, or compel him to act against his own rational judgment.

Ayn Rand
When men abandon reason, physical force becomes their only means of dealing with one another and of settling disagreements.

Ayn Rand
The government's only proper job is to protect individual rights against violence by force or fraud... to protect men from foreign invaders... to settle disputes among men according to objective laws... The greatness of the Founding Fathers was how well they understood this issue and how close some of them came to understanding it perfectly.

Ayn Rand