Ayn Rand Quotes

Moral principles of liberty that endow a person with the right to claim and acquire property at the same time oblige that person to respect every other person’s equal right to do the same.

Without property rights, no other rights are possible.

The absolute rights of individuals may be resolved into the right of personal security, the right of personal liberty, and the right to enjoy and acquire property

Individuals do not derive from government their right to contract, but bring that right with them into society.... every man retains the right to acquire property, to dispose of that property according to his own judgment, and to pledge himself for a future act.

The right to life means that a man has the right to support his life by his own work (on any economic level, as high as his ability will carry him); it does not mean that others must provide him with the necessities of life.

No freedom is secure if your property rights are not secure.

Property belongs to man and not man to property.

Freedom is not an empty sound; it is not an abstract idea; it is not a thing that nobody can feel. It means, - and it means nothing else, - the full and quiet enjoyment of your own property. If you have not this, if this be not well secured to you, you may call yourself what you will, but you are a slave.

Children learn many principles of natural law at a very early age. For example: they learn that when one child has picked up an apple or a flower, it is his, and that his associates must not take it from him against his will.

Just as man can't exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one's rights into reality, to think, to work and keep the results, which means: the right of property.

Every man has the right to life, to bodily integrity.

Make no mistake. Without individual property, none are free.

Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark.

The only dependable foundation of personal liberty is the personal economic security of private property.

Every man has a right by nature to possess property as his own.

I did more for the Russian serf in giving him land as well as personal liberty, than America did for the Negro slave set free by the proclamation of President Lincoln. How could you Americans have been so blind as to leave the Negro slave without the tools to work out his own salvation ….Without property of any kind he cannot education himself or his children.

I have a right to nothing which another has a right to take away

In short, it is the greatest absurdity to suppose it in the power of one, or any number of men, at the entering into society, to renounce their essential natural rights, or the means of preserving those rights; when the grand end of civil government, from the very nature of its institution, is for the support, protection, and defence of those very rights; the principal of which, as is before observed, are Life, Liberty, and Property.

If we are made in some degree for others, yet in a greater are we made for ourselves. It were contrary to feeling and indeed ridiculous to suppose that a man had less rights in himself than one of his neighbors, or indeed all of them put together. This would be slavery, and not that liberty which the bill of rights has made inviolable, and for the preservation of which our government has been charged.

The preservation of liberty, not the promotion of efficiency, is the primary justification for private property. Efficiency is a happy, though not accidental, by-product - and a most important by-product because liberty could not have survived if it had not also produced affluence.

The denial of the right of ownership to a man is a denial of his basic freedom: freedom without property is always incomplete. To be "secured" - but with no accompanying responsibility - is to be the slave of whatever group provides the security.

I think that nothing is so important for freedom as recognizing in the law each individual’s natural right to property, and giving individuals a sense that they own something that they’re responsible for, that they have control over, and that they can dispose of.

A right to property is founded in our natural wants, in the means with which we are endowed to satisfy these wants, and the right to what we acquire by those means without violating the similar rights of other sensible beings.

If we do not restore the Institution of Property we cannot escape restoring the Institution of Slavery; there is no third course.

Man’s rights can be violated only by the use of physical force. It is only by means of physical force that one man can deprive another of his life, or enslave him, or rob him, or prevent him from pursuing his own goals, or compel him to act against his own rational judgment.