Ayn Rand - The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

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

Ayn Rand
The attack on "selfishness" is an attack on man's self-esteem; to surrender one, is to surrender the other.

Ayn Rand
The right of a nation to determine its own form of government does not include the right to establish a slave society (that is, to legalize the enslavement of some men by others). There is no such thing as "the right to enslave." A nation can do it, just as a man can become a criminal- but neither can do it by right.

Ayn Rand
Altruism declares that any action taken for the benefit of others is good, and any action taken for one's own benefit is evil. Thus the beneficiary of an action is the only criterion of moral value - and so long as that beneficiary is anybody other than oneself, anything goes.

Ayn Rand
There are four characteristics which brand a country unmistakably as a dictatorship: one-party rule, executions without trial or with a mock trial for political offenses, the nationalization or expropriation of private property, and censorship. A country guilty of these outrages forfeits any moral prerogatives, any claim to national rights or sovereignty, and becomes an outlaw.

Ayn Rand
A man's rights are not violated by a private individual's refusal to deal with him.

Ayn Rand
When one turns from reason to faith, when one rejects the absolutism of reality, one undercuts the absolutism of one's consciousness - and one's mind becomes an organ one cannot trust any longer. It becomes what the mystics claim it to be: a tool of distortion.

Ayn Rand
Any group or "collective," large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members. In a free society, the "rights" of any group are derived from the rights of its members through their voluntary individual choice and contractual agreement, and are merely the application of these individual rights to a specific undertaking... A group, as such, has no rights.

Ayn Rand
Just as there is no such thing as a collective or racial mind, so there is no such thing as a collective or racial achievement. There are only individual minds and individual achievements-an d a culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiate d masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.

Ayn Rand
In a fully free society, taxation-or, to be exact, payment for governmental services-would be voluntary.

Ayn Rand
Men who reject the responsibility of thought and reason can only exist as parasites on the thinking of others.

Ayn Rand
To abstain from condemning a torturer, is to become an accessory to the torture and murder of his victims.

Ayn Rand
Since only an individual man can possess rights, the expression individual rights is a redundancy (which one has to use for purposes of clarification in today's intellectual chaos). But the expression collective rights is a contradiction in terms.

Ayn Rand
Man must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. To live for his own sake means that the achievement of his own happiness is man's highest moral purpose.

Ayn Rand
When I say capitalism, I mean a full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism—with a separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.

Ayn Rand
The moral cannibalism of all hedonist and altruist doctrines lies in the premise that the happiness of one man necessitates the injury of another.

Ayn Rand
Capitalism is not the system of the past; it is the system of the future — if mankind is to have a future

Ayn Rand
When you consider socialism, do not fool yourself about its nature. Remember that there is no such dichotomy as human rights versus property rights. No human rights can exist without property rights.

Ayn Rand
No man can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation, an unrewarded duty or an involuntary servitude on another man. There can be no such thing as " the right to enslave.

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
Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's own values.

Ayn Rand
A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort... is not strictly speaking a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang violence.

Ayn Rand
In a free society, one does not have to deal with those who are irrational. One is free to avoid them.

Ayn Rand
Remember that rights are moral principles which define and protect a man's freedom of action, but impose no obligations on other men.

Ayn Rand
'Censorship' is a term pertaining only to governmental action. No private action is censorship. No private individual or agency can silence a man or suppress a publication; only the government can do so. The freedom of speech of private individuals includes the right not to agree, not to listen and not to finance one's own antagonists.

Ayn Rand
A rational man never distorts or corrupts his own standards and judgment in order to appeal to the irrationality, stupidity, or dishonesty of others.

Ayn Rand
Observe, in politics, that the term extremism has become a synonym of "evil," regardless of the content of the issue (the evil is not what you are extreme about, but that you are "extreme"—i. e., consistent).

Ayn Rand
The essential characteristic of socialism is the denial of individual property rights...

Ayn Rand