Ayn Rand Quotes About Dictatorship

• Two world wars, three monstrous dictatorships-in Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, Red China-plus every lesser variant of devastating socialist experimentation in a global spread of brutality and despair, have not prompted modern intellectuals to question or revise their dogma. They still think that it is daring, idealistic and unconventional to denounce the rich. They still believe that money is the root of all evil-except government money, which is the solution to all problems.

  Ayn Rand

  War, Believe, Thinking

• 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

• Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation's troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen.

  Ayn Rand

  Country, America, Russia

  Ayn Rand (1988). “The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z”, p.143, Penguin

• Do not keep silent when your own ideas and values are being attacked. If a dictatorship ever comes to this country, it will be by the fault of those who keep silent. We are still free enough to speak. Do we have time? No one can tell.

  Ayn Rand

  Country, Courage, Freedom

• Faith and force ... are corollaries: every period of history dominated by mysticism, was a period of statism, of dictatorship, of tyranny.

  Ayn Rand

  Force, Periods, Tyranny

  Ayn Rand (1988). “The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z”, p.174, Penguin

• Ask yourself why totalitarian dictatorships find it necessary to pour money and effort into propaganda for their own helpless, chained, gagged slaves, who have no means of protest or defense. The answer is that even the humblest peasant or the lowest savage would rise in blind rebellion, were he to realize that he is being immolated, not to some incomprehensible noble purpose, but to plain, naked human evil.

  Ayn Rand

  Mean, Tyrants, Evil

  Ayn Rand (1999). “Ayn Rand Reader”, p.136, Penguin

• [Altruism] is a moral system which holds that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the sole justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, value and virtue. This is the moral base of collectivism, of all dictatorships.

  Ayn Rand

  Sacrifice, Men, Self

• There are four characteristics which brand a country unmistakably as a dictatorship: one-party rule, executions without trial or with a mock trial for political offenses, the nationalization or expropriation of private property, and censorship. A country guilty of these outrages forfeits any moral prerogatives, any claim to national rights or sovereignty, and becomes an outlaw.

  Ayn Rand

  Country, Party, Rights

  Ayn Rand (1999). “Ayn Rand Reader”, p.388, Penguin

• Volumes can be and have been written about the issue of freedom versus dictatorship, but, in essence, it comes down to a single question: do you consider it moral to treat men as sacrificial animals and to rule them by physical force?

  Ayn Rand

  Freedom, Animal, Men

  Ayn Rand (1988). “The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z”, p.141, Penguin

• Dictatorship nations are outlaws. Any free nation had the right to invade Nazi Germany and, today, has the right to invade Soviet Russia, Cuba, or any other slave pen. Whether a free nation chooses to do so or not is a matter of its own self-interest, not of respect for the nonexistent 'rights' of gang rulers. It is not a free nation's duty to liberate other nations at the price of self-sacrifice, but a free nation has the right to do it, when and if it so chooses.

  Ayn Rand

  Sacrifice, Russia, Rights

You May Also Like:

Leonard Peikoff

Ludwig von Mises

Ludwig von Mises

Nathaniel Branden

Murray Rothbard

Alan Greenspan

Milton Friedman