Ayn Rand Quotes About Capitalism

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  Government 'help' to business is just as disastrous as government persecution... the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off.

  Ayn Rand

  Witty, Business, Government

  Ayn Rand, Nathaniel Branden, Alan Greenspan, Robert Hessen (1986). “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal”, p.131, Penguin

• America's abundance was created not by public sacrifices to the common good, but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America's industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages, and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance- and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way.

  Ayn Rand

  Country, Jobs, Moving

  "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal". Book by Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden, 1966.

• Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter.

  Ayn Rand

  Life, Running, Fake People

  Ayn Rand (2016). “Atlas Shrugged”, p.316, Hamilton Books

• The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow.

  Ayn Rand

  Liberty, Today, Tomorrow

  Ayn Rand (1999). “The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution”, p.8, Penguin

• Whoever claims the right to redistribute the wealth produced by others is claiming the right to treat human beings as chattel.

  Ayn Rand

  Money, Rights, Liberty

  Ayn Rand (1988). “The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z”, p.219, Penguin

• Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman's tool is values; the bureaucrat's tool is fear.

  Ayn Rand

  Mean, Men, Offering

  Ayn Rand (1988). “The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z”, p.153, Penguin

• It is the basic, metaphysical fact of man's nature -- the connection between his survival and his use of reason -- that capitalism recognizes and protects.

  Ayn Rand

  Men, Survival, Connections

  Ayn Rand, Nathaniel Branden, Alan Greenspan, Robert Hessen (1986). “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal”, p.17, Penguin

• The man who produces while others dispose of his product is a slave.

  Ayn Rand

  Freedom, Men, Liberty

  Ayn Rand (1999). “Ayn Rand Reader”, p.380, Penguin

• It only stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.

  Ayn Rand

  Sacrifice, Men, Offering

  Ayn Rand (2005). “The Fountainhead”, p.677, Penguin

• Capitalism has been called a system of greed—yet it is the system that raised the standard of living of its poorest citizens to heights no collectivist system has ever begun to equal, and no tribal gang can conceive of.

  Ayn Rand

  Greed, Citizens, Height

  Ayn Rand (1999). “The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution”, p.167, Penguin

• The majority of those who are loosely identified by the term 'liberals' are afraid to let themselves discover that what they advocate is statism. They want to keep all the advantages and effects of capitalism, while destroying the cause, and they want to establish statism without its necessary effects. They do not want to know or to admit that they are the champions of dictatorship and slavery.

  Ayn Rand

  Champion, Majority, Slavery

  Ayn Rand (1988). “The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z”, p.264, Penguin

• All depressions are caused by government interference and the cure is always offered to take more of the poison that caused the disaster. Depressions are not the result of a free economy.

  Ayn Rand

  Government, Liberty, Poison

• From the smallest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from one attribute of man - the function of his reasoning mind.

  Ayn Rand

  Religious, Men, Mind

• Capitalism demands the best of every man - his rationality - and rewards him accordingly. It leaves every man free to choose the work he likes, to specialize in it, to trade his product for the products of others, and to go as far on the road of achievement as his ability and ambition will carry him.

  Ayn Rand

  Ambition, Men, Liberty

  Ayn Rand (1963). “For the New Intellectual: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (50th Anniversary Edition)”, p.21, Penguin

• I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

  Ayn Rand

  Life, Relationship, Bad Ass

  Atlas Shrugged pt. 3, ch. 1 (1957)

• Laissez-faire capitalism is the only social system based on the recognition of individual rights and, therefore, the only system that bans force from social relationships.

  Ayn Rand

  Rights, Laissez Faire Capitalism, Recognition

  Ayn Rand, Nathaniel Branden, Alan Greenspan, Robert Hessen (1986). “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal”, p.35, Penguin

• One of the methods used by statists to destroy capitalism consists in establishing controls that tie a given industry hand and foot, making it unable to solve its problems, then declaring that freedom has failed and stronger controls are necessary.

  Ayn Rand

  Hands, Feet, Ties

  Ayn Rand (1990). “The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought”, p.139, Penguin

• The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see.

  Ayn Rand

  Inspirational, Live Life, Teaching

• Government control of the economy, no matter in whose behalf, has been the source of all the evils in our industrial society -- and the solution is laissez-faire capitalism, i.e., the abolition of any and all forms of intervention in production and trade, the separation of State and Economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of Church and State.

  Ayn Rand

  Government, Evil, Church

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

  Ayn Rand

  Moving, Liberty, Socialism

• Capitalism has created the highest standard of living ever known on earth. The evidence is incontrovertible. The contrast between West and East Berlin is the latest demonstration, like a laboratory experiment for all to see. Yet those who are loudest in proclaiming their desire to eliminate poverty are loudest in denouncing capitalism. Man's well-being is not their goal.

  Ayn Rand

  Men, East Berlin, Goal

  Ayn Rand, Nathaniel Branden, Alan Greenspan, Robert Hessen (1986). “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal”, p.126, Penguin

• The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.

  Ayn Rand

  Winning, Evil, Hatred

  Ayn Rand (1988). “The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z”, p.170, Penguin

• ...If peace were the goal of today's intellectuals, a failure of that magnitude -- and the evidence of unspeakable suffering on so large a scale -- would make them pause and check their statist premises. Instead, blind to everything but their hatred for capitalism, they are now asserting that 'poverty breeds wars' ... But the question is: What breeds poverty? If you look a the world of today and if you look back at history, you will see the answer: the degree of a country's freedom is the degree of its prosperity.

  Ayn Rand

  Country, War, Goal

• If capitalism had never existed, any honest humanitarian should have been struggling to invent it. But when you see men struggling to evade its existence, to misrepresent its nature, and to destroy its last remnants - you maybe sure that whatever their motives, love of man is not one of them.

  Ayn Rand

  Struggle, Men, Should Have

• All the evils, abuses, and iniquities, popularly ascribed to businessmen and to capitalism, were not caused by an unregulated economy or by a free market, but by government intervention into the economy.

  Ayn Rand

  Government, Evil, Abuse

  Ayn Rand, Nathaniel Branden, Alan Greenspan, Robert Hessen (1986). “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal”, p.45, Penguin

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