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More than 50 years ago Ayn Rand - rabid capitalist, best selling novelist and founder of the school of objectivism – said that America was on the verge of communist-style socialism:

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. 

She was in a position to know, having spent her childhood in Russia during the October revolution, the Lenin coup and the violent advent of soviet-style Communism.

Rand was a pro-choice atheist with anarchist tendencies, but she was first and foremost a champion of the individual. I think we would be wise to heed her words today in a time when our government, on a daily basis, is seeking to grab power at the expense of it’s most creative and productive citizens.

Here are 10 of my favorite Rand quotes:

1. Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values.
2. Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
3. Do not ever say that the desire to “do good” by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.
4. 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.
5. If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.
6. It only stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there’s service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.
7. Potentially, a government is the most dangerous threat to man’s rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims
8. The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap.
9. The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
10. There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.

Recommended Readings:

• The Fountainhead – Rand
• Atlas Shrugged - Rand
• Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology – Rand
• Ayn Rand – And the World She Made – Anne. C. Heller

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