Rand said this about Native Americans in the question-and-answer session after her lecture “Philosophy: Who Needs It” at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, on March 6, 1974. The wording is confirmed in a transcript taken from the official recording. She said it out loud; it does not come from any of her books or essays.
“They didn't have any rights to the land and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using” Ayn Rand, Q&A following "Philosophy: Who Needs It," U.S. Military Academy, West Point, March 6, 1974
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Provenance
The West Point Q&A, March 6, 1974
Occasion
Question-and-answer session after “Philosophy: Who Needs It”
Place
U.S. Military Academy, West Point, New York
Date
March 6, 1974
Form
Spoken; preserved in an audio recording sold by the Ayn Rand Institute
And, since the Indians did not have any property rights—they didn’t have the concept of property; they didn’t even have a settled, society, they were predominantly nomadic tribes; they were a primitive tribal culture, if you want to call it that—if so, they didn’t have any rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using. It would be wrong to attack any country which does respect—or try, for that matter, to respect—individual rights, because if they do, you are an aggressor and you are morally wrong to attack them.
Transcribed from the official recording by Ben Norton for Salon (2015) ↗. Spoken remarks; the punctuation is the transcriber’s.
Salon’s Ben Norton bought the official MP3 of the West Point lecture and Q&A from the Ayn Rand Institute’s online store, and says the quotes in his piece are taken directly from it. The full line appears word for word in his Salon transcript (Oct. 14, 2015) ↗.
Wikiquote’s sourced Ayn Rand page ↗ lists the line in its 1970s section and credits it to the Q&A after her address to the West Point graduating class on March 6, 1974.
On Talk:Ayn Rand ↗, editors listened to the recording. One confirmed “she did say those things,” and a 2018 timestamped transcription has the same sentence at about 19:20 into the Q&A.
The Ayn Rand Institute’s Ayn Rand Lexicon ↗ confirms the March 1974 lecture to West Point’s graduating class and lists separate lecture and Q&A recordings.
These are spoken remarks from 1974. They survive in a recording that the Ayn Rand Institute sells, and an edited version appears in the later collection Ayn Rand Answers. That is well after the 1931 cutoff, so treat the wording as in copyright. Quoting a single sentence for commentary is a different question from who owns the rights.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
Where the quote goes wrong
Rand did say it, so the attribution holds. What usually goes wrong is the source, and the way the sentence gets joined to other lines.
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Wrong sourceThe Virtue of SelfishnessWrong book
A Wikiquote contributor noted that other websites credit this quote to Rand’s essay collection The Virtue of Selfishness. She said it aloud at West Point, so it is not in that book (Talk:Ayn Rand ↗).
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Stitched block quote“[The Native Americans] didn’t have any rights to the land…” Composite
The long version that circulates adds a bracketed subject and uses ellipses to join sentences she said at different points in her answer. A Wikiquote editor removed it for a while for those reasons, and later editors described it as paraphrase with sections left out (Talk:Ayn Rand ↗).
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Edited print versionAyn Rand Answers, ed. Robert Mayhew Variant wording
The printed text in this collection reads “rights that they had not conceived of,” and says “Any European” where the recording has “white person” (Talk:Ayn Rand ↗). Salon says this transcript “is full of errors” and puts her remarks in a different order (Salon ↗).
✓The popular wording matches what Rand said in the West Point Q&A on March 6, 1974, as transcribed from the official recording (Salon ↗).
Context
Why this line keeps resurfacing
Rand came to West Point in March 1974 to lecture the graduating class on why philosophy matters. A cadet then asked how she could hold such a positive view of America given the treatment of Native Americans, the enslavement of Black Americans and the internment of Japanese Americans. She answered at length, arguing that people who had no concept of property rights could not claim rights to the land.
The lecture was later published, but the Q&A stayed obscure. Salon reports that the Ayn Rand Institute offered the recordings free online until about October 2013 and then moved them to its paid store. Salon published the full transcript in 2015, and the line has been a standard exhibit in criticism of Rand ever since.
“They didn’t have any rights to the land.”
Recording and transcript caveats
The sound quality of the recording is reported to be poor. Independent transcriptions differ in small ways, such as “continent” or “country” in a later sentence. The sentence on this page reads the same in Salon’s transcript and in the Wikiquote talk-page transcription.
The links to the Ayn Rand Institute audio files quoted on the Wikiquote talk page no longer work. The official recording is sold through the Institute’s store.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
Ayn Rand was born in Russia and emigrated to the United States. She wrote The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and founded the philosophy she called Objectivism. In her later years she lectured widely, including a March 1974 address to West Point’s graduating class, and the question-and-answer sessions after her talks were often recorded.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
Rand, Ayn. Question-and-answer session following “Philosophy: Who Needs It,” address to the graduating class, United States Military Academy, West Point, NY, March 6, 1974. Audio recording, Ayn Rand Institute. Transcribed in Ben Norton, “Libertarian Superstar Ayn Rand Defended Native American Genocide,” Salon, October 14, 2015.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘They didn't have any rights to the land and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using’?” Last verified 3 Nov 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/they-didnt-have-any-rights-to-the-land-and-there-was-no/