Ayn Rand Quotes
When it is established that government by right can take wealth from some and give it to others. When a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law, men will use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they have passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket.
Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. Random House, 1957, p. 1023.
Referring to Nazi War Criminal Hermann Goering
Stalin did not want any political opposition with its own militia. American gun control opponents often cite this quotation to show that in Russia, Stalin achieved dictatorial power by disarming the population in general and only allowing government officials to have guns. They argue that even Stalin could not have tyrannized the entire Soviet Union if every citizen had the right to bear arms as provided for by the Second Amendment.
The deportations were the massive relocation of Armenians by the Turkish Government in 1915. In the late 19th century some Armenians tried to gain independence and were put down and massacred by the Sultan’s troops. A few decades later Russia battled Turkey. Russian Armenians and Turkish Ottoman Armenians had defected and fought for the Russians who beat the Turks badly. The Turks blamed the traitorous Armenians for the defeat and saw the Ottoman Armenians as a hostile force among them. Many Armenians were brutally massacred. Finally the Turks decided to brutally deport by foot, without sufficient provisions, the Armenians from the critically strategic area they occupied, and a huge number of Armenians died in what has been referred to as the Armenian Genocide. See {51838}, and {61904}.
Lev Davidovich Bronstein
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.
