God help us, ma'am Do you see what we saw We saw that we'd been given a law to live by, a moral law, they called it, which punished those who observed it for observing it. The more you tried to live up to it, the more you suffered the more you cheated it, the bigger reward you got. Your honesty was like a tool left at the mercy of the next man's dishonesty. The honest ones paid, the dishonest collected. The honest lost, the dishonest won. How long could men stay good under this sort of a law of goodness.
More Quotes from Ayn Rand:
She looked at the crowd and she felt, simultaneously, astonishment that they should stare at her, when this event was so personally her own that no communication about it was possible, and a sense of fitness that they should be here, that they should want to see it, because the sight of an achievement was the greatest gift a human being could offer to others.Ayn Rand
Why do they always teach us that it's easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves It's the hardest thing in the world--to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want.
Ayn Rand
Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values.
Ayn Rand
She can live through it, because we do not hold the belief that this earth is a realm of misery where man is doomed to destruction. We do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and we do not live in chronic dread of disaster. We do not expect disaster until we have specific reason to expect it and when we encounter it, we are free to fight it. It is not happiness, but suffering that we consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that we regard as the abnormal exception in human life.
Ayn Rand
A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.
Ayn Rand
The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.
Ayn Rand
Readers Who Like This Quotation Also Like:
Based on Topics: Dishonesty Quotes, Forgiveness Quotes, God Quotes, Good & Evil Quotes, Honesty & Integrity Quotes, Law & Regulation Quotes, Morality QuotesBased on Keywords: maam
We realize that Judaism as a faith can survive only in an atmosphere of general faith.
Louis Finkelstein
I don't know what I was trying to get out of a tenor - but it never really satisfied me until one day I picked up my alto and I said, "Where have you been?" and I said right here for now on!
Jerome Richardson
I can work in films as long as the story doesn't have a realistic nature. If I'm working with an allegory, a fantasy, it can be developed in synthetic terms.
Manuel Puig