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Potentially, a government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.

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
Threat
Disarmed
Physical
Legally
Dangerous
Potentially
Rights
Monopoly
Force
Victims
Use
Legal
Government
Holds
Men
Victim

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In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. 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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I agree that [marriage] should be treated like a business deal. But every business deal has to have its own terms and its own kind of currency.
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There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.
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Emotions are inherent in your nature, but their content is dictated by your mind. Your emotional capacity is an empty motor, and your values are the fuel with which your mind fills it.
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If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing.
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every man is free to rise as far as he's able or willing, but the degree to which he thinks determines the degree to which he'll rise.
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What do I think of President Reagan? The best answer to give would be: I don't think of him. And the more I see, the less I think.
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He, too, stood looking at her for a moment - and it seemed to her that it was not a look of greeting after an absence, but the look of someone who had thought of her every day of that year. She could not be certain, it was only an instant, so brief that just as she caught it, he was turning.
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Man's character is the product of his premises.
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Love should be treated like a business deal, but every business deal has its own terms and its own currency. And in love, the currency is virtue. You love people not for what you do for them or what they do for you. You love them for the values, the virtues, which they have achieved in their own character.
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Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?
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She thought: at this moment, the glass stem between his fingers feels just like the one between mine. We have this much in common.
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All the evils, abuses, and iniquities, popularly ascribed to businessmen and to capitalism, were not caused by an unregulated economy or by a free market, but by government intervention into the economy.
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Selfishness does not mean only to do things for one's self. One may do things, affecting others, for his own pleasure and benefit. This is not immoral, but the highest of morality.
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There are two side to every issue.
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