“Businessmen are the one group that distinguishes capitalism and the American way of life from the totalitarian statism that is swallowing the rest of the world. All the other social groups- workers, farmers, professional men, scientists, soldiers- exist under dictatorships, even though they exist in chains, in terror, in misery, and in progressive self-destruction. But there is no such group as businessmen under a dictatorship. Their place is taken by armed thugs: by bureaucrats and commissars. Businessmen are the symbol of a free society- the symbol of America.”

— Ayn Rand, book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Businessmen are the one group that distinguishes capitalism and the American way of life from the totalitarian statism …" by Ayn Rand?

Ayn Rand322

Russian-American novelist and philosopher 1905–1982

Related quotes

“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 book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966)

“The most tyrannical dictatorships the world has known have existed under the aegis of parliaments.”

Muammar Gaddafi book The Green Book

The Green Book (1975)
The Green Book (1975)

“Any Organized social group is always a stratified social body. There has not been and does not exist any permanent social group which is "flat" and in which all members are equal.”

Pitirim Sorokin (1889–1968) American sociologist

Pitirim Sorokin (1927) Social Mobility, p. 12

“The easiest way to do Transmission Meditation is to join an existing group. If there is no group in your area within a reasonable distance, you can form your own group by joining with two other people. More people are more useful, but a basic group of three is a practical working group.”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

Source: Transmission: A Meditation for the New Age (1983)

“The hundreds of scientific studies of this phenomenon come to one general conclusion: Leadership is highly variable or "contingent" upon a large variety of important variables such as nature of task, size of the group, length of time the group has existed, type of personnel within the group and their relationships with each other, and amount of pressure the group is under. It docs not seem likely that we'll be able to devise a way to select the best leader for a particular situation. Even if we could, that situation would probably change in a short time and thus would require a somewhat different type of leader.”

Charles Perrow (1925–2019) American sociologist

Source: 1970s, "The short and glorious history of organizational theory", 1973, p. 13

“Socialism and rationalism are to this day the touchstones of humanity, the rocks which lie in the course of revolution and science. Groups of swimmers, driven by reflection or the waves of circumstance against these rocks, break up at once into two camps, which, under different disguises, remain the same throughout all history, and may be distinguished either in a great political party or in a group of a dozen young men. One represents logic; the other, history: one stands for dialectics; the other for evolution. Truth is the main object of the former, and feasibility of the latter.”

Alexander Herzen book My Past and Thoughts

ibid, Ch. 8, s. 12
My Past and Thoughts(1852-1870)

“Culture is the collective programming of the mind distinguishing the members of one group or category of people from others.”

Geert Hofstede (1928) Dutch psychologist

Source: Culture's consequences: International differences in work-related values (1980), p. 25; as cited in Rüdiger Pieper (1990) Human Resource Management: An International Comparison. p. 130.

“Men and animals do not merely struggle to maintain their individual existence; they are members of larger social groups. And, all too often, it is the social unit, not the individual, whose survival comes first.”

Howard Bloom (1943) American publicist and author

The Clint Eastwood Conundrum
The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History (1997)

“They lived in abysmal misery, yet they had no prospect of a better tomorrow. They existed under capitalism, yet there was no accumulation of capital.”

Paul A. Baran (1909–1964) American Marxist economist

Source: The Political Economy Of Growth (1957), Chapter Five, On The Roots Of Backwardness, p. 144

“Good evening. Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts. The victims were in airplanes or in their offices -- secretaries, businessmen and women, military and federal workers. Moms and dads. Friends and neighbors. Thousands of lives were suddenly ended by evil, despicable acts of terror.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2001, A Great People Has Been Moved to Defend a Great Nation (September 2001)

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Ayn Rand322

Related quotes

Related topics