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Ayn Rand

United States writer (born in Russia) noted for her polemical novels and political conservativism (1905-1982)

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My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.

– Ayn Rand

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If there is any one proof of a man's incompetence, it is the stagnant mentality of a worker who, doing some small routine job in a vast undertaking, does not care to look beyond the lever of a machine, does not choose to know how the machine got there or what makes his job possible, and proclaims that the management of the undertaking is parasitical and unneccessary.

– Ayn Rand

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So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of all money

– Ayn Rand

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Doctors are not servants of their patients, they are traders like everyone else in a free society and they should bear that title proudly considering the crucial importance of the services they offer.

– Ayn Rand

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Guilt is a rope that wears thin.

– Ayn Rand

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I can accept anthing, except what seems to be the easiest for most people: the half-way, the almost, the just-about, the in-between.

– Ayn Rand

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I don't build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.

– Ayn Rand

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I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.

– Ayn Rand

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

– Ayn Rand

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The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it.

– Ayn Rand

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There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.

– Ayn Rand

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A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.

– Ayn Rand

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Live a life as a monument to your soul.

– Ayn Rand

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The common good of a collective -- a race, a class, a state -- was the claim and justification of every tyranny ever established over men. Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equaled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism? Does the fault lie in men's hypocrisy or in the nature of the principle? The most dreadful butchers were the most sincere. The believed in the perfect society reached through the guillotine and the firing squad. Nobody questioned their right to murder since they were murdering for an altruistic purpose. It was accepted that man must be sacrificed for other men. Actors change, but the course of the tragedy remains the same. A humanitarian who starts with the declarations of love for mankind and ends with a sea of blood. It goes on and will go on so long as men believe that an action is good if it is unselfish. That permits the altruist to act and forces his victims to bear it. The leaders of collectivist movements ask nothing of themselves. But observe the results.

– Ayn Rand

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Thanksgiving is a typically American holiday...The lavish meal is a symbol of the fact that abundant consumption is the result and reward of production.

– Ayn Rand

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When I die, I hope to go to Heaven, whatever the Hell that is.

– Ayn Rand

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Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

– Ayn Rand

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In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.

– Ayn Rand

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America's abundance was not created by public sacrifices to the common good, but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes.

– Ayn Rand

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Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

– Ayn Rand

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Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.

– Ayn Rand

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Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values.

– Ayn Rand

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Love is an expression and assertion of self-esteem, a response to one's own values in the person of another. One gains a profoundly personal, selfish joy from the mere existence of the person one loves. It is one's own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns, and derives from love.

– Ayn Rand

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What is a demanding pleasure that demands the use of ones mind! Not in the sense of problem solving, but in the sense of exercising discrimination, judgment, awareness.

– Ayn Rand

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Money is the barometer of a society's virtue.

– Ayn Rand

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America's abundance was created not by public sacrifices to the common good, but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America's industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance -- and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way.

– Ayn Rand

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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.

– Ayn Rand

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Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.

– Ayn Rand

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Do you think that we want those laws to be observed? We want them broken. There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power the 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.

– Ayn Rand

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Every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics -- a rational ethics -- as a precondition of rebirth.

– Ayn Rand

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Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others.

– Ayn Rand

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Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive.

– Ayn Rand

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Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice.

– Ayn Rand

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He had a big head and a face so ugly it became almost fascinating.

– Ayn Rand

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I am leaving it as I found it. Take over. It's yours.

– Ayn Rand

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I swear by my life, and love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

– Ayn Rand

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It is a matter of record that in the German Election of 1933, the Communist Party was ordered by its leaders to vote for the Nazis - with the explanation that they could later fight the Nazis for power, but first they had to help destroy their common enemy: capitalism and its parliamentary form of government.

– Ayn Rand

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It is not advisable, James, to venture unsolicited opinions. You should spare yourself the embarrassing discovery of their exact value to your listener.

– Ayn Rand

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Men have been taught that it is a virtue to agree with others. But the creator is the man who disagrees. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to swim with the current. But the creator is the man who goes against the current. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to stand together. But the creator is the man who stands alone.

– Ayn Rand

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Rationality is the recognition of the fact that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it.

– Ayn Rand

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Senor d'Anconia said that you bore him, Mr. Taggart.

– Ayn Rand

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So long as [men] hold the tribal notion that the individual is sacrificial fodder for the collective, that some men have the right to rule others by force, and that some (any) alleged 'good' can justify it -- there can be no peace within a nation and no peace among nations.

– Ayn Rand

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The Argument from Intimidation is a confession of intellectual impotence.

– Ayn Rand

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The difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is a matter of time.

– Ayn Rand

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The idea that 'the public interest' supersedes private interests and rights can have but one meaning that the interests and rights of some individuals take precedence over the interests and rights of others.

– Ayn Rand

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The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man's self-defense, and, as such, may only resort to force only against those who start the use of force.

– Ayn Rand

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The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. whenever evil wins, it is only by default by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.

– Ayn Rand

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Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision.

– Ayn Rand

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Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of other men. Blood, whips and guns--or dollars. Take your choice--there is no other.

– Ayn Rand

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Upper classes are a nation's past, the middle class its future.

– Ayn Rand

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Volumes can be and have been written about the issue of freedom versus dictatorship, but, in essence, it comes down to a single question: do you consider it moral to treat men as sacrificial animals and to rule them by physical force?

– Ayn Rand

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Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think.

– Ayn Rand

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When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, 'Who is destroying the world?' You are.

– Ayn Rand

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