Ayn Rand Quotes on Law & Regulation (9 Quotes)

The first right on earth is the right of the ego. Man's first duty is to himself. His moral law is never to place his prime goal within the persons of others. His moral obligation is to do what he wishes, provided his wish does not depend primarily upon other men.

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

Potentially, a government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.

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.

There can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions to an individual, but permitted to a mob.

They proclaim that every man is entitled to exist without labor and, the laws of reality to the contrary notwithstanding, is entitled to receive his 'minimum sustenance' his food, his clothes, his shelter with no effort on his part, as his due and his birthright. To receive it from whom.

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

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.

The only proper purpose of a government is to protect mans rights, which means to protect him from physical violence.... The only proper functions of a government are the police, to protect you from criminals the army, to protect you from foreign invaders and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, and to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law.