Ayn Rand Quotes

Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of other men. Blood, whips and guns--or dollars. Take your choice--there is no other.

Because I support the Second Amendment doesn't mean that I want people who shouldn't have guns to be able to threaten you, kill you or members of your family.

Because drug dealers shoot each other in London, Norfolk farmers can't have guns to defend their homes. I mean, no one wants a gun - except at 4am when they hear a strange sound in the kitchen.

Money is the general medium of exchange. It is the thing for which all other goods are traded, the means of final payment for such goods on the market.

If we stuck to the Constitution as written, we would have: no federal meddling in our schools; no Federal Reserve; no U.S. membership in the UN; no gun control; and no foreign aid. We would have no welfare for big corporations, or the "poor"; no American troops in 100 foreign countries; no NAFTA, GAT, or "fast-track"; no arrogant federal judges usurping states rights; no attacks on private property; no income tax. We could get rid of most of the agencies, and most of the budget. The government would be small, frugal, and limited.

The bourgeoisie's weapon is starvation. If as a writer or artist you run counter to their narrow notions they simplyand silently withdraw your means of subsistence. I sometimes wonder how many people of talent are executed in this way every year.

I've pretty much always used my positions as a bully pulpit. What that means is strongly advocating for the things I feel are really important. Gun violence, to me, is the highest-priority public-health issue, and I have to make sure Congress is aware of it, the American people are aware of it, the president is aware of it, and that we all begin together to develop policies to exterminate the disease - the epidemic, really - of gun violence.

Furthermore, the financial and social investment in prisons means that black and brown youth become, essentially, fodder for the machinery of capitalized incarceration. The steady supply of guns in the U.S. makes an already untenable situation even more dangerous, and all of us must raise our voices, write to Congress, hit the streets in protest, attend budget meetings of local municipalities - all to state our opposition to such criminal procedures and practices for our youth.

There's a deeper conversation to be had on guns, and just because I happen to know where I fall into that conversation doesn't mean that I don't want to have that conversation.

I am not anti-gun. I'm pro-knife. Consider the merits of the knife. In the first place, you have to catch up with someone in order to stab him. A general substitution of knives for guns would promote physical fitness. We'd turn into a whole nation of great runners. Plus, knives don't ricochet. And people are seldom killed while cleaning their knives.

I’m not a gun owner and, as I think as is the case for the more than half the people in the country who also aren’t gun owners, that means that for me guns are alien. In the current rhetorical climate people seem not to want to say: I think guns are kind of scary and don’t want to be around them.

I understand that Donald's [Trump] been strongly supported by the NRA. The gun lobby's on his side. They're running millions of dollars of ads against me.

The founders of our nation feared paper currency because it gave government the means to steal from its citizens.

Money is a wonderful invention. It lets us save, it lets us specialize, right? I couldn't be a professor if there wasn't any money. Every day I would have to raise chicken and bread and broccoli and go ahead and spend all my time trading. So, money is a wonderful mechanism.

Because the state can no longer protect us from crime, it wants to take away from us the means of protecting ourselves. This is the logic of gun control.

You mean to say that when an imbecile walks into a church, office, day care center, or school, stumbling about, almost zombie-like, with gun-filled hands at his side, blabbering incoherently to his next victim, the reaction of grown men and women is to run, cry, whimper, and hide under a desk or pew? The sheeping of America is nearly complete.

My biggest challenge is to educate the American people, to make access to health care available for all, and to make sure that prevention plays a big part in health care. In the case of guns, prevention means we prevent homicides and devastating, expensive gun injuries by preventing those who shouldn't have guns from getting their hands on guns.

I'm gonna get me a gun, all those people who put me down you better get ready to run.

Certain bedrock principles - arguably a true conservative mindset - dictate a respect for life. A life-conserving sensibility means that guns are meant for self-defense, not for needless killing. [...] This gun owner is no gun nut; but a right-to-self-defense fanatic.

The gun control mentality is ruthlessly absurd. It suggests that you pass a law which will bind law-abiding citizens — they won't have access to weapons. Now, we know that criminals, by definition, are people who don't obey laws. Therefore, you can pass all the laws that you want, they will still have access to these weapons, just as they have access to illegal drugs and other things right now. That means you end up with a situation in which the law-abiding folks can't defend themselves, and the crooks have all the guns.

[Sen. John] Kerry is also a man who opposes the death penalty, wants to restrict access to guns and voted against the resolution approving the start of ground operations against Saddam Hussein in 1991 - just what you would expect from Ted Kennedy's partner and Michael Dukakis's running mate.

Most gun dealers follow the law and run honest businesses. But the statistics show that 1 percent of dealers sell more than half of all illegal guns. Why isn't the federal government going after them? Here's one reason: unlike mayors, members of Congress don't get a phone call in the middle of the night when a cop is shot and killed. They don't deliver the eulogies.

My guess [is] . . . that the great majority of Americans are saying they favor gun control when they really mean gun banishment. . . . I think the country has long been ready to restrict the use of guns, except for hunting rifles and shotguns, and now I think we're prepared to get rid of the damned things entirely - the handguns, the semis and the automatics.

I want to protect our constitutional right to bear arms in a legal and thoughtful way with background checks that also don't want people to get shot and murdered, but it doesn't mean that you can't own a gun.

That's what Donald Trump said when he starts talking about, "The Second Amendment people might have..." "You're not taking my guns. No matter who you appoint to the court, you're not taking my guns," is all it means, pure and simple. If everybody could just take a breath here and let's get back to who's really doing damage to our country.