Ayn Rand

The man who does not think for himself does not think at all.

The man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.

The man who is unwilling to work for his own happiness is a parasite on society.

The man who speaks to you of duty, expects you to do his.

The man who refuses to think is a willing slave to those who do.

The only good is the good of the individual. All other goods, such as the good of the family, the good of the community, the good of the nation, are subordinate to it.

Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion that a man's intellectual and moral attributes are determined by the genetic pigmentation of his skin or the shape of his skull — which means that his character is determined by his bone-structure.

The most depraved type of human being is the man who is happy to serve. A man who is happy to serve is a slave.

There are no such things as 'rights' for animals.

Anyone who is against capitalism is against man.

A culture is not the sum of its average, but of its best.

The man who is wrong and knows it, is not as dangerous as the man who is wrong and believes he is right.

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.

The government is not a solution to our problem; the government is the problem.

The only thing that can save the world is the return to reason, to the mind, to individualism, to capitalism.

I am not a believer in God. I am an atheist.

The moral justification of capitalism is man's right to exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself.

Equality, in the sense of political equality, is equality before the law. But equality of income, equality of property, equality of privilege, equality of anything else, is not equality; it is slavery.

There are no contradictions in reality. Contradictions exist only in the mind, in the mind of a man who makes a mistake.

There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism—by vote. It is the difference between murder and suicide.