Ayn Rand Quotes

A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.

No single person, including the President of the United States, should ever be given the power to make a medical decision for potentially millions of Americans. Freedom over one's physical person is the most basic freedom of all, and people in a free society should be sovereign over their own bodies. When we give government the power to make medical decisions for us, we in essence accept that the state owns our bodies.

The authoritarian one believed that an individual's rights were basically provided by governments and were determined by states. The other society - ours - tended to believe that a large portion of our rights were inherent and couldn't be abrogated by governments, even if this seemed necessary.

The government continues to erode our freedom.

I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P. J. O'Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and for government to gain ground.

The individual is greater than the state.

The so-called liberals of today have the very popular idea that freedom of speech, of thought, of the press, freedom of religion, freedom from imprisonment without trial-that all these freedoms can be preserved in the absence of what is called economic freedom. They do not realize that, in a system where there is no market, where the government directs everything, all those other freedoms are illusory, even if they are made into laws and written up in constitutions.

Governments don't control things. A government can't control the economy without controlling people.

Terrorists can only take my life. Only my government can take my freedom.

The fact throughout history is that whenever government dominates the economic affairs of its citizenry, a free society is eroded, then destroyed, and a minority government ensues. Personal liberty without economic liberty is an absolute contradiction; the one cannot exist without the other.

Americans' liberty is perishing beneath the constant growth of government power. Federal, state and local government's are confiscating citizens' property, trampling their rights, and decimating their opportunities more than ever before.... American liberty can still be rescued from the encroachments of government. The first step to saving our liberty is to realize how much we have already lost, how we lost it, and how we will continue to lose unless fundamental political changes occur.

The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents.

My quarrel is not with the legitimate role of government but with the unlimited role of government.

The history of liberty is the history of limitations on the power of government, not the increase of it. When we resist, therefore, the concentration of power, we are resisting the processes of death, because concentration of power is what always precedes the destruction of human liberties.

When we give government the power to make medical decisions for us, we, in essence, accept that the state owns our bodies.

I am a mortal enemy to arbitrary government and unlimited power.

We are now moving towards complete collectivism or socialism, a system under which everybody is enslaved to everybody.

The government that can take everything from somebody can take everything from everybody. And there ought to be a limit.

Our natural, inalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation from government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment.

For libertarians, freedom entails the right of people to live their lives any way they choose, so long as their conduct is peaceful. For conservatives, freedom entails the right of government to do just about anything it wants, even if its conduct is violent.

Personal freedom has grown greatly within China, and that will provoke ever more points of conflict between the individual and state.

Our economic freedom is founded on individual property rights; government should never be permitted to take those away.

I think if you open the door to government control of television, then you let in a host of questions about rights.

Our government shouldn't tell us where to travel and where not to travel.