A Quote by Ayn Rand
The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
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Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).
No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward a time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction cannot lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient than those of our Revolutionary ancestors.
That's what the Senate is about. It's the last bastion of minority rights, where a minority can be heard, where a minority can stand on its feet, one individual if necessary, and speak until he falls into the dust
That's what the Senate is about. It's the last bastion of minority rights, where a minority can be heard, where a minority can stand on its feet, one individual if necessary, and speak until he falls into the dust.
All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
Any group or "collective," large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members. In a free society, the "rights" of any group are derived from the rights of its members through their voluntary individual choice and contractual agreement, and are merely the application of these individual rights to a specific undertaking... A group, as such, has no rights.
You don't know who the next group is that's unpopular. The Bill of Rights isn't for the prom queen. The bill of rights isn't for the high school quarterback. The Bill of Rights is for the least among us. The Bill of Rights is for minorities. The Bill of Rights is for those who have minority opinions.
If anarcho-communism served to regiment the population in the name of libertarian unity, if it served in any way through collectivist measures to deny the rights of the individual instead of reconciling the rights of the individual with the collective, I would definitely stand completely on the side of the individualist who is trying to rescue above all that most precious thing that makes us human - consciousness and personality.
Virginia States' rights, as our forefathers conceived it, was a protection of the right of the individual citizen. Those who preach most frequently about states' rights today are not those seeking the protection of the individual citizen, but his exploitation. The time is long past — if indeed it ever existed — when we should permit the noble concept of states' rights to be betrayed.
Of strong importance to me is the defense of minority rights, not just racial minorities, but ideological and religious minorities.
You see, what makes us different than the rest of the world fundamentally is our American respect and legal appreciation of individual rights and individual property. And, I emphasize - individual.
Since only an individual man can possess rights, the expression "individual rights"? is a redundancy (which one has to use for purposes of clarification in today's intellectual chaos). But the expression "collective rights"? is a contradiction in terms.
I will never surrender the rights of the individual - the complete rights of the individual - to any "ism" whatever.
Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority.
As you are now you are just a liquid phenomenon, changing every moment, nothing stable. Really you cannot claim any "I" -- you don't have one. You are many "I"s just in a flow, a riverlike flow. You are a crowd, not an individual yet. But meditation can make you an individual.
The democratic ideal springs from the ideas of liberty, equality, majority rule through free elections, protection of the rights of minorities, and freedom to subscribe to multiple loyalties in matters of religion, economics, and politics rather than to a total loyalty to the state. The spirit of democracy is the idea of importance and worth in the individual, and faith in the kind of world where the individual can achieve as much of his potential as possible.
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