Ayn Rand

"Capitalism has been called a system of greed—yet it is the system that raised the standard of living of its poorest citizens to heights no collectivist system has ever begun to equal, and no tribal gang can conceive of." Ayn Rand

"Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason." Ayn Rand

"The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me." Ayn Rand

"The government was set to protect man from criminals-and the constitution was written to protect man from the government. The Bill of Rights was not directed at private citizens, but against the government-as an explicit declaration that individual rights supersede any public or social power." Ayn Rand

"Just as man can't exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one's rights into reality, to think, to work and keep the results, which means: the right of property." Ayn Rand

"Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice." Ayn Rand

"People create their own questions because they are afraid to look straight. All you have to do is look straight and see the road, and when you see it, don't sit looking at it - walk." Ayn Rand

"The freedom of speech of private individuals includes the right to not agree, not to listen, and not to finance one's own antagonists." 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

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