Ayn Rand Quotes
When a man attempts to deal with me by force, I answer him, by force.
Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. Random House, 1957.
He was criticizing the George W. Bush administration for attacking Iraq, a country which had not attacked the United States or Americans abroad while America did not attack those terrorists and countries which had killed Americans. For example, Hezbollah which blew up the Marine Barracks in Lebanon and the naval ship Cole.
The force used by the British in Massachusetts backfired in that after the Battles of Lexington and Concord, each of the colonies held meetings and most were not only supportive of resistance but as in this case, advocated violent resistance. The Revolution was on.
This appears to be the first American utterance of a longstanding doctrine of foreign policy.
Ayn Rand was a Russian-American writer and philosopher. She is known for her two best-selling novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and for developing a philosophical system she named Objectivism. Born and educated in Russia, she moved to the United States in 1926. She had a play produced on Broadway in 1935 and 1936. After two early novels that were initially unsuccessful, she achieved fame with her 1943 novel, The Fountainhead. In 1957, Rand published her best-known work, the novel Atlas Shrugged. Afterward, she turned to non-fiction to promote her philosophy, publishing her own periodicals and releasing several collections of essays until her death in 1982.
