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The 20 Best Quotes From Ayn Rand
Townhall.com ^ | July 20, 2012 | John Hawkins

Posted on 07/20/2012 12:26:45 PM PDT by Kaslin

20) "Ask yourself why totalitarian dictatorships find it necessary to pour money and effort into propaganda for their own helpless, chained, gagged slaves, who have no means of protest or defense. The answer is that even the humblest peasant or the lowest savage would rise in blind rebellion, were he to realize that he is being immolated, not to some incomprehensible noble purpose, but to plain, naked human evil."

19) "The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities."

18) "Pity for the guilty is treason to the innocent."

17) "Man’s unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself. If a drought strikes them, animals perish — man builds irrigation canals; if a flood strikes them, animals perish — man builds dams; if a carnivorous pack attacks them animals perish — man writes the Constitution of the United States. But one does not obtain food, safety or freedom — by instinct.”

16) "And what is the state but a servant and a convenience for a large number of people, just like the electric light and the plumbing system? And wouldn't it be preposterous to claim that men must exist for their plumbing, not the plumbing for the men."

15) "Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation's troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen."

14) "I swear by my life, and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."

13) "Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by production."

12) "Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion — when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing — when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors — when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you — when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice — you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot."

11) "We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality."

10) "Government 'help' to business is just as disastrous as government persecution... the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off."

9) "The right to life is the source of all rights -- and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave."

8) "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."

7) "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)."

6) "The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles."

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

4) "The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see."

3) "There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. When there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws."

2) "America’s abundance was created not by public sacrifices to 'the common good,' but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America’s industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance—and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way."

1) "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."


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial
KEYWORDS: aynrand; books; economics; quotes
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To: Kaslin

Ayn Rand in Realville 2012 BUMP!!!!


61 posted on 07/20/2012 3:31:46 PM PDT by newfreep (Breitbart sent me...)
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To: Kaslin
This one became one of my favorites right after 9/11:

A viler evil than to murder a man, is to sell him suicide as an act of virtue. A viler evil than to throw a man into a sacrificial furnace, is to demand that he leap in, of his own will, and that he build the furnace, besides.

62 posted on 07/20/2012 3:32:01 PM PDT by brewcrew (Life is tough. It's tougher if you're stupid. --John Wayne)
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Comment #63 Removed by Moderator

Comment #64 Removed by Moderator

To: Kaslin

I disagree with her on religion but the point is that we labor to earn the things we need and want in life and we deserve to keep what we make. The problem is that government is out to get our chips as well as boss us around. She did not like that as well as most of us here.


65 posted on 07/20/2012 3:42:46 PM PDT by Nowhere Man (June 28th, 2012, the Day America Jumped The Shark.)
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To: Kaslin
The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide—as, I think, he will. - Atlas Shrugged, Part 2, Chapter 2.
66 posted on 07/20/2012 3:52:02 PM PDT by KarlInOhio (You only have three billion heartbeats in a lifetime.How many does the government claim as its own?)
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To: fwdude

Maybe repudiated but not refuted.


67 posted on 07/20/2012 4:20:08 PM PDT by GunRunner (***Not associated with any criminal actions anonymus by the ATF***)
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To: r-q-tek86
Thanks for the ping!

"And what is the state but a servant and a convenience for a large number of people, just like the electric light and the plumbing system? And wouldn't it be preposterous to claim that men must exist for their plumbing, not the plumbing for the men."

Preposterous, yes, but that is precisely the point behind the sort of statism that posits man as a slave of his own creation, the state. Friedrich Nietzsche, from whom Rand drew one wing of her narrative, stated that in the absence of God as moral authority (his "God is dead") the result is either no moral authority - nihilism - or the rise of some other source of moral authority, his ubermenschen. Rand's case was that these had already arisen in the form of the Producers such as Reardon, Mulligan, Galt, and Dagny Taggart. The case of Rand's deadly enemies was that this ubermensch resided in the form of the state or the Party, not only in the form of moral authority but in the role of arbiter of all truth.

It was that last that made those political doctrines anathema to an individualist such as Rand, whose real philosophical roots were in Aristotle. And yet she drew back from Aristotle's conviction (Metaphysics, book V) that his own system of thought led ineluctably to the existence of God, his "Unmoved Mover". Rand made the connection between the two philosophies explicit in so naming the first chapter of Atlas Shrugged. For her that godhead needed to be moved to Man because God did not meet her criteria for proof.

For that reason I have disagreed with a mountain of criticism and her own claim that she was an atheist. Whatever label you choose to use, or misuse, hers can never be any better than an agnostic position if she is consistent to her system.

68 posted on 07/20/2012 4:20:48 PM PDT by Billthedrill
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To: DuncanWaring
There’s an interesting juxtaposition - the guy who can see his hands responding to the invisible hand.

heh heh heh

69 posted on 07/20/2012 4:24:51 PM PDT by Zuben Elgenubi
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To: the invisib1e hand
HI Tenacious 1, Can you read? I in no way commented favorably nor unfavorably on Rand’s quotes. However if you had half a brain you’d have been able to infer I that agree with her philosophy, which I do.

Your ignorance bears false witness.

- the invisible hand e-mail to Tenacious1

You, my FRiend, need some help.

70 posted on 07/20/2012 4:25:57 PM PDT by Tenacious 1 (The Click-&-Paste Media exists & works in Utopia, riding unicorns & sniffing pixy dust.)
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To: fwdude
Rand would have championed homosexual “marriage.”

I love it when people who've never bothered to read Rand put words in her mouth. You're dead wrong.

71 posted on 07/20/2012 4:49:29 PM PDT by BfloGuy (The final outcome of the credit expansion is general impoverishment.)
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To: Stat-boy
“There are a number of things I don’t approve of about Ayn Rand—first of all that her objectivist philosophy requires atheism.”

There are no "requirements" other than rational thinking to Objectivism. Ayn Rand [and I'm a big fan] has or had no right or ability to insist on blind belief in every word she spoke. Now, she was quite the egotist and probably would have liked that, but, still, she couldn't enforce it.

I disagree sharply with Rand on a couple issues -- issues where I believe her personal feelings overcame her objective reasoning [abortion is one of those.] Nonetheless it's no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater, as they say.

Philosophy should teach you how to think, not what to think.

72 posted on 07/20/2012 5:01:16 PM PDT by BfloGuy (The final outcome of the credit expansion is general impoverishment.)
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To: ansel12
I didn't make up a thing. The words are his.

refuse to have my ideas assigned to me as if I were an intellectual slave

Get over it.

73 posted on 07/20/2012 5:13:56 PM PDT by South40 ("Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance." Hussein Obama, Cairo, Egypt, June 4, 2009)
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To: South40

You made up a quote and have been spreading it here for 7 years, you need to quit claiming it as a “quote”.

When someone googles the source of the fake quote it leads to you at freerepublic, on thread after thread since 2005.

Use the actual quote if you like it but don’t rewrite it to suit you and then strive to convince us it is accurate, I almost posted it somewhere else today, but luckily I was suspicious of the source.


74 posted on 07/20/2012 5:52:49 PM PDT by ansel12 (Massachusetts Governors,,, where the GOP goes for it's "conservative" Presidential candidates.)
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To: Kaslin

ping


75 posted on 07/20/2012 7:30:57 PM PDT by gorush (History repeats itself because human nature is static)
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To: Kaslin

“16) “And what is the state but a servant and a convenience for a large number of people, just like the electric light and the plumbing system? And wouldn’t it be preposterous to claim that men must exist for their plumbing, not the plumbing for the men.””

Abraham Lincoln’s rational for the illegality of secession was most preposterous indeed.


76 posted on 07/20/2012 7:33:47 PM PDT by Monorprise
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To: BfloGuy
I love it when people who've never bothered to read Rand put words in her mouth. You're dead wrong.

And you know for a fact that I haven't read Rand exactly how?

77 posted on 07/20/2012 8:54:59 PM PDT by fwdude ( You cannot compromise with that which you must defeat.)
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To: SENTINEL

I don’t see the difference in theses quotes.


78 posted on 07/20/2012 9:03:09 PM PDT by Monorprise
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To: ansel12
Firstly, I made nothing up. I found the quote years ago as I posted it.

Secondly, the words I posted were his words. He said:

"...refuse to have my ideas assigned to me as if I were an intellectual slave".

I posted:

I refuse to have my views dictated to me as if I were an intellectual slave."

That you are trying to make a big deal of the slight difference suggests you have other issues; perhaps you drink too much, I don't know. Whatever your problem, I am done wasting my time responding to your moronic protestation. Bye.

79 posted on 07/20/2012 9:09:11 PM PDT by South40 ("Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance." Hussein Obama, Cairo, Egypt, June 4, 2009)
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To: fwdude
And you know for a fact that I haven't read Rand exactly how?

How could I possibly know "for a fact" that you haven't read Rand?

I wrote that because Rand famously despised homosexuality. Now, she also thought that government should have no say in the private behavior of individuals, but that could not be considered an endorsement of gay marriage.

80 posted on 07/20/2012 9:47:59 PM PDT by BfloGuy (The final outcome of the credit expansion is general impoverishment.)
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