Quotes from book
The Virtue of Selfishness

The Virtue of Selfishness

The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism is a 1964 collection of essays by the philosopher Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden. Most of the essays originally appeared in The Objectivist Newsletter. The book covers ethical issues from the perspective of Rand's Objectivist philosophy. Some of its themes include the identification and validation of egoism as a rational code of ethics, the destructiveness of altruism, and the nature of a proper government.

“Any group or “collective,” large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members.”

Ayn Rand book The Virtue of Selfishness

The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

“The moral cannibalism of all hedonist and altruist doctrines lies in the premise that the happiness of one man necessitates the injury of another.”

Ayn Rand book The Virtue of Selfishness

The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

“Observe, in politics, that the term extremism has become a synonym of "evil," regardless of the content of the issue (the evil is not what you are extreme about, but that you are "extreme"—i. e., consistent).”

Ayn Rand book The Virtue of Selfishness

The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

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

Ayn Rand book The Virtue of Selfishness

The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

“Since only an individual man can possess rights, the expression “individual rights” is a redundancy (which one has to use for purposes of clarification in today’s intellectual chaos). But the expression “collective rights” is a contradiction in terms.”

Ayn Rand book The Virtue of Selfishness

The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

“The skyline of New York is a monument of a splendor that no pyramids or palaces will ever equal or approach.”

Ayn Rand book The Virtue of Selfishness

The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

“When one observes the nightmare of the desperate efforts made by hundreds of thousands of people struggling to escape from the socialized countries of Europe, to escape over barbed-wire fences, under machine-gun fire—one can no longer believe that socialism, in any of its forms, is motivated by benevolence and by the desire to achieve men’s welfare.”

Ayn Rand book The Virtue of Selfishness

The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

“Man’s rights can be violated only by the use of physical force. It is only by means of physical force that one man can deprive another of his life, or enslave him, or rob him, or prevent him from pursuing his own goals, or compel him to act against his own rational judgment.”

Ayn Rand book The Virtue of Selfishness

The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

“Neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as man is free to attempt to survive by any random means, as a parasite, a moocher or a looter, but not free to succeed at it beyond the range of the moment—so he is free to seek his happiness in any irrational fraud, any whim, any delusion, any mindless escape from reality, but not free to succeed at it beyond the range of the moment nor to escape the consequences.”

Ayn Rand book The Virtue of Selfishness

Sometimes paraphrased as "You can ignore reality, but you cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality."
The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

“Poverty, ignorance, illness and other problems of that kind are not metaphysical emergencies. By the metaphysical nature of man and of existence, man has to maintain his life by his own effort; the values he needs—such as wealth or knowledge—are not given to him automatically, as a gift of nature, but have to be discovered and achieved by his own thinking and work.”

Ayn Rand book The Virtue of Selfishness

The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

“All the reasons which made the initiation of physical force evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative.”

Ayn Rand book The Virtue of Selfishness

The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

“When you consider socialism, do not fool yourself about its nature. Remember that there is no such dichotomy as “human rights” versus “property rights.” No human rights can exist without property rights.”

Ayn Rand book The Virtue of Selfishness

The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

“The only proper, moral purpose of a government is to protect man’s rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence—to protect his right to his own life, to his own liberty, to his own property and to the pursuit of his own happiness. Without property rights, no other rights are possible.”

Ayn Rand book The Virtue of Selfishness

The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

“The men who attempt to survive, not by means of reason, but by means of force, are attempting to survive by the method of animals.”

Ayn Rand book The Virtue of Selfishness

The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

“The moral precept to adopt…is: Judge, and be prepared to be judged.”

Ayn Rand book The Virtue of Selfishness

The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

“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 book The Virtue of Selfishness

The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

“Capitalism is the only system where such men are free to function and where progress is accompanied, not by forced privations, but by a constant rise in the general level of prosperity, of consumption and of enjoyment of life.”

Ayn Rand book The Virtue of Selfishness

The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

“When a man declares: "There are no blacks and whites [in morality]" he is making a psychological confession, and what he means is: "I am unwilling to be wholly good—and please don't regard me as wholly evil!"”

Ayn Rand book The Virtue of Selfishness

The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

“Errors of knowledge are not breaches of morality; no proper moral code can demand infallibility or omniscience.”

Ayn Rand book The Virtue of Selfishness

The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

“When I say “capitalism,” I mean a full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism—with a separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.”

Ayn Rand book The Virtue of Selfishness

The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

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