Ayn Rand Quotes

The limits of tyrants are proscribed by the endurance of those whom they suppress.

They (tyrants) should be attacked, not as ordinary enemies, but as assassins and rebellious brigands. Kings, aristocrats, tyrants, whoever they may be, are slaves in revolt against the sovereign of the land, who is the human race, and against the legislator of the Universe, who is Nature.

The Arab Spring, with all of its failings and failures, exposed the lie that if we are to live, then we must live as slaves. It was an attempt to undermine not only the orthodoxy of dictatorship but also an international political orthodoxy where every activity must be approved by the profit logic of the 'ledger.'

There are two kinds of rebellion. The first is one in which the slave demands something that the tyrant has got. The second is one in which he demands something that the tyrant has not got.

Those who voluntarily put power into the hands of a tyrant ... must not wonder if it be at last turned against themselves.

It was a place that is trying to destroy the individual by every means possible; trying to break his spirit, so that he accepts that he is No. 6 and will live there happily as No. 6 for ever after. And this is the one rebel that they can't break.

Freedom is contagious. That's why despots fear it so much.

The world will not accept dictatorship or domination.

My forebears refused to cut the sugar cane for plantation owners, and I am recognisably a product of that background.

When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.

Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.

I knew from reading about Sarah Grimke that she'd been given a handmaid to be her personal slave and that her name was Hetty. The only other fact I knew about her was that Sarah taught her to read: They conspired in a very subversive way, by locking the door and screening the keyhole.

Dictators free themselves, but they enslave the people.

Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.

Communism was something so hideous that you had to be an exceptional conformist or a fool not to see the evil around you.

The death of dictator Kim Jong-Il has cast all eyes on North Korea, a country without literature or freedom or truth.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it.

The best hope to smash Fascism in the world.

No dictatorship can have any other aim but that of self-perpetuation, and it can beget only slavery in the people tolerating it; freedom can be created only by freedom, that is, by a universal rebellion on the part of the people and free organization of the toiling masses from the bottom up.

A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.

Rebellion! the very word is a confession; an avowal of tyranny, outrage, and oppression. It is taken from the despot's code, and has no terror for others than slavish souls.

The removal of a tyrant is not merely justifiable; it is the highest duty of every true revolutionist.

If it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children, and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say, let it be done. [He was executed.]

… so long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.