Quote

The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.

Ayn Rand

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Ayn Rand
Age: 77 †
Born: 1905
Born: February 2
Died: 1982
Died: March 6
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Philosopher
Playwright
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
St. Petersburg
Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum
Men
Government
Aren
Live
Crime
Declares
Wells
Becomes
Crack
Without
Impossible
Cracks
Well
Wisdom
Breaking
Enough
Law
Libertarian
Many
Makes
Criminals
Things
Power
Laws

More quotes by Ayn Rand

Image
Freedom comes from seeing the ignorance of your critics and discovering the emptiness of their virtue.
Ayn Rand
Image
To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one's thinking to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one's mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.
Ayn Rand
Image
A man who seeks escape from the responsibility of supporting his life by his own thought and effort, and wishes to survive by conquering, ruling and exploiting others, is NOT an Individualist.
Ayn Rand
Image
He, too, stood looking at her for a moment - and it seemed to her that it was not a look of greeting after an absence, but the look of someone who had thought of her every day of that year. She could not be certain, it was only an instant, so brief that just as she caught it, he was turning.
Ayn Rand
Image
Faith and force ... are corollaries: every period of history dominated by mysticism, was a period of statism, of dictatorship, of tyranny.
Ayn Rand
Image
I regret nothing. There have been things I missed, but I ask no questions, because I have loved it, such as it has been, even the moments of emptiness, even the unanswered-and that I loved it, that is the unanswered in my life.
Ayn Rand
Image
She fell asleep, lying there, her hand clasping his. Her last awareness, before she surrendered the responsibility of consciousness, was the sense of an enormous void, the void of a city and of a continent, where she would never be able to find the man whom she had no right to seek.
Ayn Rand
Image
I could die for you. But I couldn't, and wouldn't, live for you.
Ayn Rand
Image
That which is not worth contemplating in life, is not worth recreating in art.
Ayn Rand
Image
When you force a man to act against his own choice and judgment, it's his thinking that you want him to suspend.
Ayn Rand
Image
When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is learning to understand and control the behavior of crop plants and domestic animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized.
Ayn Rand
Image
To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. That is freedom. That and nothing else.
Ayn Rand
Image
Don't rely on our knowledge of what's best for your future. We do know, but it can't be best until you know it.
Ayn Rand
Image
Who was it that said he needed a fulcrum? Give me an unobstructed right-of-way and I'll show them how to move the earth!
Ayn Rand
Image
A desire presupposes the possibility of action to achieve it action presupposes a goal which is worth achieving.
Ayn Rand
Image
A BUSINESSMAN cannot force you to buy his product if he makes a mistake, He suffers the consequences if he fails, he takes the loss. A bureaucrat, forces you to obey his decisions, whether you agree with him or not... If he makes a mistake, you suffer the consequences If he fails, He passes the loss on to you, in the form of heavier taxes.
Ayn Rand
Image
Civilization does not have to perish. The brutes are winning only by default.
Ayn Rand
Image
I think. I am. I will.
Ayn Rand
Image
There is only one institution that can arrogate to itself the power legally to trade by means of rubber checks: the government. And it is the only institution that can mortgage your future without your knowledge or consent: government securities (and paper money) are promissory notes on future tax receipts, i.e., on your future production.
Ayn Rand
Image
Do you know that my personal crusade in life (in the philosophical sense) is not merely to fight collectivism, nor to fight altruism? These are only consequences, effects, not causes. I am out after the real cause, the real root of evil on earth the irrational.
Ayn Rand