Ayn Rand Quotes

It's funny how the hippies and the punks tried to get rid of the conservatives, but they always seem to get the upper hand in the end.

I want to have a society based on truth. That means no longer hiding what we used to hide.

The political elite has never told the truth.

I think about this every day. I wonder, 'Is today the day where everybody stops lying to themselves and realises that the government is the enemy?'

People have been willing to accept that the government is lying to us, but they are now more willing to accept the concept of aliens and other life forms. There's just a slew of stuff out there right now. It's been people's closet belief system, and now it's coming out of the closet.

I always believed that social science was a progressive profession because it was the powerful who had the most to hide about how the world actually worked and if you could show how the world actually worked it would always have a de-masking and a subversive effect on the powerful. I don't think that's quite true, but it seems to me it's not bad as a point of departure anyway.

We used to say to the apartheid government: you may have the guns, you may have all this power, but you have already lost. Come: join the winning side. His Holiness and the Tibetan people are on the winning side.

Ask me no questions, and I'll tell you no lies.

I welcome this opportunity of pricking the bloated bladder of lies with the poniard of truth

When I started out, people were afraid of parish priests. Now they're afraid of newspaper editors.

Whenever I take up a newspaper, I seem to see Ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be Ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sand of the sea.... We are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light.

The painful secret of gods and kings is that men are free, Aegistheus. You know it and they do not.

What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power.

There are no secrets in life; just hidden truths that lie beneath the surface.

Secrets with girls, like guns with boys, are never valued till they make a noise.

Journalism is just a gun. It’s only got one bullet in it, but if you aim right, that’s all you need. Aim it right, and you can blow a kneecap off the world.

Society is an illusion to the young citizen. It lies before him in rigid repose, with certain names, men, and institutions, rootedlike oak-trees to the centre, round which all arrange themselves the best they can. But the old statesman knows that society is fluid; there are no such roots and centres; but any particle may suddenly become the centre of the movement, and compel the system to gyrate round it, as every man of strong will, like Pisistratus, or Cromwell, does for a time, and every man of truth, like Plato, or Paul, does forever.

Secrets affect you more than you’d think. You lie to keep them hidden. You steer talk away from them. You worry someone’ll discover yours and tell the world. You think you are in charge of the secret, but isn’t it the secret who’s actually using you?

Much truth is spoken, that more may be concealed.

Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in 'changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them.

A small town is automatically a world of pretense. Since everyone knows everyone else's business, it becomes the job of the populace to act as if they don't know what is going on instead of its being their job to try to find out.

I see they found out the universe is 80 million years older than we thought. It's also been lying about its weight.

The future and the hope for the middle class church lies in the renewal of its lifeblood, which is only possible if the church succeeds in winning the working class.

"A man inferior with the blade or with his thoughts can still so elevate himself," Entreri explained curtly, "if he can impart the belief that some god or other speaks through him. It is the greatest deception in all the world and one embraced by kings and lords, while the minor lying thieves on the streets or Calimport and other cities lose their tongues for so attempting to coax the purses of others."