Ayn Rand - The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

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The only proper, moral purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence—to protect his right to his own life, to his own liberty, to his own property and to the pursuit of his own happiness. Without property rights, no other rights are possible.

Ayn Rand
A 'whim' is a desire experienced by a person who does not know and does not care to discover its cause.

Ayn Rand
A rational man is guided by his thinking - by a process of Reason - not by his feelings and desires.

Ayn Rand
The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word 'selfishness' is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual 'package-deal,' which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind.

Ayn Rand
Living in a society, instead of on a desert island, does not relieve a man of the responsibility of supporting his own life.

Ayn Rand
If a man speculates on what 'society' should do for the poor, he accepts thereby the collectivist premise that men's lives belong to society and that he, as a member of society, has the right to dispose of them...that psychological confession reveals the enormity of the extent to which altruism erodes men's capacity to grasp the concept of rights or the value of an individual life.

Ayn Rand
Faith is the commitment of one's consciousness to beliefs for which one has no sensory evidence or rational proof. A mystic is a man who treats his feelings as tools of cognition. Faith is the equation of feeling with knowledge.

Ayn Rand
One's own independent judgment is the means by which one must choose one's actions, but it is not a moral criterion nor a moral validation; only reference to a demonstrable principle can validate one's choices.

Ayn Rand
Indiscriminate tolerance and indiscriminate condemnation are not two opposites: they are two variants of the same evasion. To declare that everybody is white or everybody is black or everybody is neither white nor black, but gray, is not a moral judgment, but an escape from the responsibility of moral judgment.

Ayn Rand
Any alleged 'right' of one man, which necessitates the violation of the rights of another, is not and cannot be a right.

Ayn Rand
The man who produces while others dispose of his product is a slave.

Ayn Rand
The moral precept to adopt... is: Judge, and be prepared to be judged.

Ayn Rand
Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).

Ayn Rand
There can be no justification for choosing any part of that which one knows to be evil.

Ayn Rand
The Argument from Intimidation is a confession of intellectual impotence.

Ayn Rand
Since reason is man's basic means of survival, that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; that which negates, opposes or destroys it is the evil.

Ayn Rand
To discuss evil in a manner implying neutrality, is to sanction it.

Ayn Rand
It is fairly easy to grasp abstract moral principles; it can be very difficult to apply them to a given situation, particularly when it involves the moral character of another person..

Ayn Rand
Errors of knowledge are not breaches of morality; no proper moral code can demand infallibility or omniscience.

Ayn Rand
Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.

Ayn Rand
We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.

Ayn Rand
Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man's genetic lineage—the notion that a man's intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.

Ayn Rand
The government was set to protect man from criminals, and the Constitution was written to protect man from the government.

Ayn Rand
Morality is a code of black and white. When and if men attempt a compromise, it is obvious which side will necessarily lose and which will necessarily profit.

Ayn Rand
A Conformist is a man who declares, "It's true because others believe it" - but an Individualist is NOT a man who declares, "It's true because I believe it." An Individual declares, "I believe it because I see in reason that it is true.

Ayn Rand
America's skyscrapers were not built by public funds nor for a public purpose: they were built by the energy, initiative and wealth of private individuals for personal profit. And, instead of impoverishing the people, these skyscrapers, as they rose higher and higher, kept raising the people's standard of living — including the inhabitants of the slums.

Ayn Rand
Capitalism is the only system where such men are free to function and where progress is accompanied, not by forced privations, but by a constant rise in the general level of prosperity, of consumption and of enjoyment of life.

Ayn Rand
Love is an expression and assertion of self-esteem, a response to one's own values in the person of another. One gains a profoundly personal, selfish joy from the mere existence of the person one loves. It is one's own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns, and derives from love....

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
Neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as man is free to attempt to survive by any random means, as a parasite, a moocher or a looter, but not free to succeed at it beyond the range of the moment—so he is free to seek his happiness in any irrational fraud, any whim, any delusion, any mindless escape from reality, but not free to succeed at it beyond the range of the moment nor to escape the consequences.

Ayn Rand