Ayn Rand Quotes

Look around, and you see everywhere the exertions and acts of individuals restricted, regulated, or promoted, on the principle of the common welfare.

Private interests must be made subservient to the general interests of the community

No public interest is anything other or nobler than a massed accumulation of private interests.

Upon the principles of reason, the good of many is preferable to the good of a few or of one; a lasting good is to be preferred before a temporary, the public before the private.

It is vain to talk of the interest of the community, without understanding what is the interest of the individual.

As individual life has more and more given place to crowded community life, the rights and privileges once deemed essential to the perfect liberty of the individual are often found to stand in the way of the public welfare, and to breed wrong and injustice to the community at large.

Everyone thinks chiefly of his own, hardly ever of the public interest.

The modern democratic state is legitimated by the priority of the public over the private, where public goods trump private interests, and the commonweal takes precedence over individual fortunes.

No nation can be free unless it is strong enough and active enough to control, whenever necessary, every private individual or group whose action affects the general welfare

There are certain public needs that outweigh private interests.

An individual, in promoting his own interest, may injure the public interest; a nation, in promoting the general welfare, may check the interest of a part of its members.

I try to persuade people to act in ways that are not only in their own interest, but in the interest of society at large.

The balance of private good and general welfare is at the bottom of civilized morals; but the morals of the Heroic Age are founded on individuality, and on nothing else.

Liberals worry that what's best for the individual might not be better for the public at large. But that philosophy assumes something vicious about each and every one of us. It assumes we only care about ourselves.

A liberty subject to law and subordinate to the common welfare.

We must stop thinking of the individual and start thinking about what is best for society.

The right to private property is inconceivable without responsibilities to the common good.

The public power of all society is above every soul contained in the same society.

The national interest is not simply the sum of our special interests and attachments.

Private advantages are often impediments of publick Profit…publick profits should be in a single power to direct, whose Interest is only the benefit of the whole

Liberty was realized when the citizens were ... willing to sacrifice their private interests for the sake of the community

…mortals cannot cherish what is private without injury to the community…to the extent that we call anything our own it absorbs our affections and diverts them from the service of the common good.

We have to be guided by the interest of society and the development of the state.

By pursuing his own interest (the individual) frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.

Benefit to the community precedes benefit to the individual.