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Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men’s vices or men’s stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment’s or a penny’s worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you’ll scream that money is evil.

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More quotes by Ayn Rand

“Free competition enforced by law” is a grotesque contradiction in terms.

A world where the thought of each man will not be his own, but an attempt to guess the thought of his neighbor.

Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead (1943)

Today, racism is regarded as a crime if practiced by a majority—but as an inalienable right if practiced by a minority.

The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1971)

Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.

The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

I shall love and respect, but neither command nor obey.

Anthem (1938)

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Men accept servility in order to acquire wealth; as if they could acquire anything of their own when they cannot even assert that they belong to themselves.

Étienne de La Boétie Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1548)

Health is the greatest gift, contentment is the greatest wealth, a trusted friend is the best relative, Nibbana is the greatest bliss.

Gautama Buddha

Opulence is always the result of theft, if not committed by the actual possessor, then by his predecessor.

Jerome The Cry for Justice (1915)

Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the Enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.

Max Horkheimer Dialektik der Aufklärung [Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Ayn Rand (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.