Ayn Rand

When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is learning to understand and control the behavior of crop plants and domestic animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized.

Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future.

A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.

Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth, the man who would make his fortune no matter where he started.

Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think.

Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting for us in our graves - or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.

The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.

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.

Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.

Rights are not a matter of numbers - and there can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob.

Potentially, a government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.

Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).