Ayn Rand quotes

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.
Ayn Rand

There are two sides to every issue: One side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is
always evil.
Ayn Rand

The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see.
Ayn Rand

What greater wealth is there than to own your life and to spend it on growing? Every living
thing must grow. It can't stand still. It must grow or perish.
Ayn Rand

The Arabs are one of the least developed cultures. They are typically nomads. Their culture
is primitive, and they resent Israel because it's the sole beachhead of modern science and
civilization on their continent. When you have civilized men fighting savages, you support the
civilized men, no matter who they are.
Ayn Rand

Poverty, ignorance, illness and other problems of that kind are not metaphysical emergencies.
By the metaphysical nature of man and of existence, man has to maintain his life by his own
effort; the values he needs - such as wealth or knowledge - are not given to him
automatically, as a gift of nature, but have to be discovered and achieved by his own
thinking and work.
Ayn Rand

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.
Ayn Rand

If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing.
Ayn Rand

Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive,
a payment, a value; political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of
punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman's tool is values; the
bureaucrat's tool is fear.
Ayn Rand

Capitalism has created the highest standard of living ever known on earth. The evidence is
incontrovertible. The contrast between West and East Berlin is the latest demonstration, like
a laboratory experiment for all to see. Yet those who are loudest in proclaiming their desire to
eliminate poverty are loudest in denouncing capitalism. Man's well-being is not their goal.
Ayn Rand