Ayn Rand Quotes

You know, our sense of individuality is just the number one target of civilization.

Civilization, or "the system" or "society" or whatever you want to call it, is best served not by mules but by free men.

I do believe people ought to be left alone. I don't care who you are or what you do at home or who your friends are or where you hang out, what kind of music you listen to, what you do in your home is your own business. That's always been who I am. I am a leave me alone kind of guy.

Civilization exists precisely so that there may be no masses but rather men alert enough never to constitute masses.

In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.

In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.

All laws are an attempt to domesticate the natural ferocity of the species.

This right to privacy ... doesn't exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution, this right that was created, it was created in Griswold–Griswold was the contraceptive case–and abortion. And now we're just extending it out. And the further you extend it out, the more ...this freedom actually intervenes and affects the family. You say, 'Well, it's my individual freedom.' Yes, but it destroys the basic unit of our society because it condones behavior that's antithetical to strong healthy families. Whether it's polygamy, whether it's adultery, where it's sodomy, all of those things, are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family.

The right to be let alone—the most comprehensive of rights and the most valued by civilized men.

By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes to be his duty against the influences of authority and majorities, custom and opinion.

Political liberty is good only so far as it produces private liberty.

The individual is prior to society and society must be ordered to the good of the individual.

All persons have the right to privacy and to intimacy.

There is no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.

In an over-organized society, the individual is altogether crushed out of existence. He gains the whole wealth of social thought around him and loses his own soul.

Privacy matters. Privacy allows us to determine who we are and what we want to be.

The people, the ultimate governors, must have absolute freedom of, and therefore privacy of, their individual opinions and beliefs regardless of how suspect or strange they may appear to others. Ancillary to that principle is the conclusion that an individual must also have absolute privacy over whatever information he may generate in the course of testing his opinions and beliefs.

I can't imagine anything worse than being in a position that you're not allowed to live your life privately.

Every child has a right to its own bent. . . . It has a right to find its own way and go its own way, whether that way seems wise or foolish to others, exactly as an adult has. It has a right to privacy as to its own doings and its own affairs as much as if it were its own father.

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy.

It seems to me, Golan, that the advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy.

Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

I do not believe that the government should have its long nose poked into the private consensual relationships between people.

Outside among your fellows, among strangers, you must preserve appearances, a hundred things you cannot do; but inside, the terrible freedom.

Privacy is a function of liberty.