Ayn Rand

"Without property rights, no other rights are possible." Ayn Rand

"There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for me to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed or enforced nor objectively interpreted - and you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt." Ayn Rand

"The Founding Fathers were neither passive, death-worshipin g mystics nor mindless, power-seeking looters; as a political group they were a phenomenon unprecedented in history: they were thinkers who were also men of action." Ayn Rand

"Do not make the mistake of the ignorant who think that an individualist is a man who says: “I’ll do as I please at everybody else’s expense.” An individualist is a man who recognizes the inalienable individual rights of man—his own and those of others." Ayn Rand

"The goal of the 'liberals' - as it emerges from the record of the past decades - was to smuggle this country into welfare statism by means of single, concrete, specific measures, enlarging the power of the government a step at a time, never permitting these steps to be summed up into principles, never permitting their direction to be identified or the basic issue to be named. Thus, statism was to come, not by vote or by violence, but by slow rot - by a long process of evasion and epistemological corruption, leading to a fait accompli." Ayn Rand

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

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

"The end does not justify the means. No one's rights can be secured by the violation of the rights of others." Ayn Rand

"I am not morally obligated to care more for a man than he cares for himself." Ayn Rand

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

"When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is learning to understand and control the behavior of crop plants and domestic animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized." Ayn Rand

"God... a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive." Ayn Rand

"I don't build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build." Ayn Rand

"If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject." Ayn Rand