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Ayn Rand Quotes about Evil - Page 2

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You have no choice about your capacity to feel that something is good for you or evil, but what you will consider good or evil, what will give you joy or pain, what you will love or hate, desire or fear, depends on your

You have no choice about your capacity to feel that something is good for you or evil, but what you will consider good or evil, what will give you joy or pain, what you will love or hate, desire or fear, depends on your standard of value.

Ayn Rand
Pain, Hate, Evil
Ayn Rand (2005). “Atlas Shrugged”, p.964, Penguin

Virtue is not an end in itself. Virtue is not its own reward or sacrificial fodder for the reward of evil. Life is the reward of virtue-and happiness is the goal and the reward of life.

Ayn Rand
Evil, Goal, Rewards
Ayn Rand (2005). “Atlas Shrugged”, p.964, Penguin

The American businessmen, as a class, have demonstrated the greatest productive genius and the most spectacular achievements ever recorded in the economic history of mankind. What reward did they receive from our culture and its intellectuals? The position of a hated, persecuted minority. The position of a scapegoat for the evils of the bureaucrats.

Ayn Rand
Business, Class, Evil
Ayn Rand (1988). “The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z”, p.74, Penguin

So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. . . . When a man attempts to deal with me by force, I answer him by force. It is only as retaliation that force may be used and only against the man who starts its use. No, I do not share his evil or sink to his concept of morality: I merely grant him his choice, destruction, the only destruction he had the right to choose: his own.

Ayn Rand
Men, Long, Evil

You'll come back, because yours is an error of knowledge, not a moral failure, not an act of surrender to evil, but only the last act of being victim to your own virtue. We'll wait for you and when you come back, you will have discovered that there need never be any conflict among your desires, nor so tragic a clash of values as the one you've borne so well.

Ayn Rand
Knowledge, Errors, Evil

There can be no justification for choosing any part of that which one knows to be evil.

Ayn Rand
Evil, Justification, Knows
Ayn Rand (1964). “The Virtue of Selfishness”, p.72, Penguin

I cannot stand Tolstoy, and reading him was the most boring literary duty I ever had to perform, his philosophy and his sense of life are not merely mistaken, but evil, and yet, from a purely literary viewpoint, on his own terms, I have to evaluate him as a good writer.

Ayn Rand
Philosophy, Reading, Evil
Ayn Rand, Nathaniel Branden (1966). “The Objectivist”

The worst evil that you can do, psychologically, is to laugh at yourself. That means spitting in your own face.

Ayn Rand
Mean, Evil, Laughing
Question period following Lecture 11 of Leonard Peikoff's series "The Philosophy of Objectivism", 1976.

I am unwilling to be wholly good—and please don't regard me as wholly evil!

Ayn Rand
Evil, Please, Regard
Ayn Rand (1964). “The Virtue of Selfishness”, p.74, Penguin

When one acts on pity against justice, it is the good whom one punishes for the sake of the evil; when one saves the guilty from suffering, it is the innocent whom one forces to suffer. There is no escape from justice, nothing can be unearned and unpaid for in the universe, neither in matter nor in spirit—and if the guilty do not pay, then the innocent have to pay it.

Ayn Rand
Evil, Justice, Suffering
Ayn Rand (2016). “Atlas Shrugged”, p.434, Hamilton Books

What I want you to understand, is the full evil of those who claim to have become convinced that this earth, by its nature, is a realm of malevolence where the good has no chance to win. Let them check their premises. Let them check their standards of value. Let them check - before they grant themselves the unspeakable license of evil-as-necessity - whether they know what is the good and what are the conditions it requires.

Ayn Rand
Winning, Evil, Want
Ayn Rand (1957). “Atlas Shrugged”

I refuse to apologize for my ability -- I refuse to apologize for my success -- I refuse to apologize for my money. If this is evil, make the most of it.

Ayn Rand
Money, Evil, Apologizing
Ayn Rand (2005). “Atlas Shrugged”, p.463, Penguin

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