Ayn Rand Quotes

As long as dishonorable success outranks honest effort—as long as society bows and cringes before the great thieves, there will be little ones enough to fill the jails.

If you teach your boy that it is right to buy a vote, it is an easy step for him to learn to use money to bribe or corrupt officials or trustees of any class. If you teach your boy that it is right to steal votes, it is an easy step for him to believe that it is right to steal whatever he may need or greatly desire. The results of such an influence will enter every branch of society, it will reach your bank cashiers, and affect positions of trust in every department; it will ultimately enter your courts, and affect the administrations of justice.

In adultery, there is usually tenderness and self-sacrifice; in murder, courage; in profanation and blasphemy, a certain satanic splendour. Judas elected those offences unvisited by any virtues: abuse of confidence and informing.

Once you start doing something bad, then it's easy to take the next step - and in the end, you're a moral sewer.

All is disgust when a man leaves his own nature and does what is unfit.

Nowadays those are rewarded who make right appear wrong.

The first and worst of all frauds is to cheat one's self. All sin is easy after that.

... a moral skunk .... [who has] debauched America ...

Two evils, greed and faction are the destruction of all justice.

When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to [profess] things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.

When a religion or ideology becomes dominant, the lack of controls will result in widening spirals of license leading to degradation and corruption.

Even a little untruth destroys a man, as a drop of poison ruins milk.

The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle - a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him, he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology or cannibalism.

In the acceptance of depravity the sense of the past is most truly captured. What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance? Corruption is the Age of Time.

The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language.

Because we have sought to cover up past evil, though it still persists, we have been powerless to check the new evil of today.Evil unchecked grows, Evil tolerated poisons the whole system. And because we have tolerated our past and present evils, international affairs are poisoned and law and justice have disappeared from them.

A society composed of none but the wicked could not exist; it contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction, and without a flood, would be swept away from the earth by the deluge of its own iniquity.

When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion - when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed.

Greed is at the bottom of most of the wrong-doing with which government has to deal.

The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension.

Vertue flies from the heart of a Mercenary man.

Corruption hates what is not corrupt.

I would say that today, dishonesty is the rule, and honesty the exception. It could be, statistically, that more people are honest than dishonest, but the few that really control things are not honest, and that tips the balance.

Of all things in the world that stink in the nostrils of men, hypocrisy is the worst.

When one feels no shame in telling a deliberate lie, there is no evil, I tell you, he will not do.