A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort ... is not strictly speaking a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang violence.
Ayn RandI do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and I do not live in chronic dread of disaster. It is no happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that I regard as the abnormal exception in Human Life.
Ayn RandThe good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive โ a definition that invalidates man's consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence. The good, say the mystics of muscle, is Society โ a thing which they define as an organism that possesses no physical form, a super-being embodied in no one in particular and everyone in general except yourself.... The purpose of man's life, say both, is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question.
Ayn Rand