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I'd like to dedicate this entire page to my all time favorite writer and philosopher, Ayn Rand.
The following are some excerpts of her own statements which reverberate throughout all her writing. Scroll down the page to select, if you want, one of the three most signinficant Ayn Rand writings.
"To recognize individual rights means to recognize and accept the conditions required by man's nature for his
proper survival."
"The Declaration of Independence stated that men 'are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.'
Whether one believes that man is a product of a Creator or of nature, the issue of man's origin does not alter the
fact that he is an entity of a specific kind - a rational being - that he cannot function successfully under coercion,
and that rights are a necessary condition of his particular mode of survival."
"The source of man's rights is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A - and Man is Man.
Rights are conditions of existence required by man's nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is
right for him to use his mind, it is right for him to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and
to keep the product of his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature
forbids him the irrational."
"Rights are a moral concept - and morality is a matter of choice. Men are free not to choose man's survival as the
standard of their morals and their laws, but not free to escape from the fact that the alternative is a cannibal
society, which exists for a while by devouring its best and collapses like a cancerous body, when the healthy have
been eaten by the diseased, when the rational have been consumed by the irrational. Such has been the fate of your
societies in history, but you've evaded the knowledge of the cause. I am here to state it: the agent of retribution
was the law of identity, which you cannot escape. Just as a man cannot live by means of the irrational, so two men
cannot, or two thousand, or two billion. Just as a man can't succeed by defying reality, so a nation can't, or a
country, or a globe. A is A. The rest is a matter of time, provided by the generosity of victims."
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