18 quotes
Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.
The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)
Errors of knowledge are not breaches of morality; no proper moral code can demand infallibility or omniscience.
The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)
The moral cannibalism of all hedonist and altruist doctrines lies in the premise that the happiness of one man necessitates the injury of another.
The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)
The men who attempt to survive, not by means of reason, but by means of force, are attempting to survive by the method of animals.
The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)
The skyline of New York is a monument of a splendor that no pyramids or palaces will ever equal or approach.
The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)
Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.
The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)
All the reasons which made the initiation of physical force evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative.
The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)
Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer—and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.
The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)
Any group or “collective,” large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members.
The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)
The moral precept to adopt...is: Judge, and be prepared to be judged.
The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)
A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race—and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin.
The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)
When you consider socialism, do not fool yourself about its nature. Remember that there is no such dichotomy as “human rights” versus “property rights.” No human rights can exist without property rights.
The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)
Observe, in politics, that the term extremism has become a synonym of "evil," regardless of the content of the issue (the evil is not what you are extreme about, but that you are "extreme"—i.e., consistent).
The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)
When I say “capitalism,” I mean a full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism—with a separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.
The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)
Capitalism is the only system where such men are free to function and where progress is accompanied, not by forced privations, but by a constant rise in the general level of prosperity, of consumption and of enjoyment of life.
The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)
Man's rights can be violated only by the use of physical force. It is only by means of physical force that one man can deprive another of his life, or enslave him, or rob him, or prevent him from pursuing his own goals, or compel him to act against his own rational judgment.
The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)
When a man declares: "There are no blacks and whites [in morality]" he is making a psychological confession, and what he means is: "I am unwilling to be wholly good—and please don't regard me as wholly evil!"
The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)
Since only an individual man can possess rights, the expression “individual rights” is a redundancy (which one has to use for purposes of clarification in today's intellectual chaos). But the expression “collective rights” is a contradiction in terms.
The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)