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The only power any 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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Ayn Rand
Age: 77 †
Born: 1905
Born: February 2
Died: 1982
Died: March 6
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Philosopher
Playwright
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
St. Petersburg
Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum
Many
Makes
Criminals
Things
Power
Laws
Men
Government
Aren
Live
Crime
Declares
Wells
Becomes
Crack
Without
Impossible
Cracks
Well
Wisdom
Breaking
Enough
Law
Libertarian

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The truly and deliberately evil men are a very small minority it is the appeaser who unleashes them on mankind.
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Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind, and a step that travels unlimited roads.
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The mark of an honest man... is that he means what he says and knows what he means.
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When you are asked to love everybody indiscriminately, that is to love people without any standard, to love them regardless of whether they have any value or virtue, you are asked to love nobody.
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It only stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.
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Degrees do not matter... one does not bargain about inches of evil.
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You don't build for the way people live, but for the way they should live. I don't write about people as they are, but as they could be and should be.
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The basic need of the creator is independence. The reasoning mind cannot work under any form of compulsion. It cannot be curbed, sacrificed or subordinated to any consideration whatsoever. It demands total independence in function and in motive.
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Do you know the hallmark of the second-rater? It's resentment of another man's achievement.
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I am opposed to all forms of control. I am for an absolute, laissez-faire, free, unregulated economy.
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If you know that this life is all that you have, wouldn't you make the most of it?
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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.
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Do not keep silent when your own ideas and values are being attacked. If a dictatorship ever comes to this country, it will be by the fault of those who keep silent. We are still free enough to speak. Do we have time? No one can tell.
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I got the idea [for Anthem's theme] in my school days, in Soviet Russia, when I heard all the vicious attacks on individualism, and asked myself what the world would be like if men lost the word 'I.'
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No one's happiness but my own is in my power to achieve or to destroy.
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You love people, not for what you do for them or what they do for you. You love them for their values their virtues.
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What whip lashed them to their knees in shame and submission? The worship of the word We.
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She knew that she could not have reached this white serenity except as the sum of all the colors, of all the violence she had known.
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