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Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting for us in our graves - or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.

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
Dream
Thrive
Earth
Graves
Greatness
Atheism
Asks
Waiting
Heaven
Whether
Sith

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The age of the skyscraper is gone. This is the age of the housing project. Which is always a prelude to the age of the cave.
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The only thing that matters my goal my reward my beginning my end is the work itself. My work done my way. A private personal selfish egotistical motivation. That’s the only way I function. That’s all I am.
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Man's character is the product of his premises.
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Art is the indispensable medium for the communication of a moral ideal.
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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.
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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.
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Ordinary human concern for human distress does not manifest itself ordinarily in the form of a gun aimed at the wallets and earnings of one's neighbors.
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Your emotional capacity is an empty motor, and your values are the fuel with which your mind fills it. If you choose a mix of contradictions, it will clog your motor, corrode your transmission and wreck you on your first attempt to move with a machine which you, the driver, have corrupted.
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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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Great men can't be ruled.
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Value is that which one acts to gain and/or keep. Virtue is the act by which one aims and/or keeps it.
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She watched the prairies the rivers, the towns slipping past at an untouchable distance below - and she noted that the sense of detachment one feels when looking at the earth from a plane was the same sense she felt when looking at people: only her distance from people seemed longer. - Dagny Taggart
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Any refusal to recognize reality, for any reason whatever, has disastrous consequences. There are no evil thoughts except one: the refusal to think. Don't ignore your own desires.... Don't sacrifice them. Examine their cause. There is a limit to how much you should have to bear.
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If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man's only moral commandment is: Thou shalt think. But a 'moral commandment' is a contradiction in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.
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A building has integrity, just as a man and just as seldom! It must be true to its own idea, have its own form, and serve its own purpose!
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Most American men are repressors.
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The more neurotic and evasive a person is, the shorter the range of his interests.
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America's founding Ideal was the principle of individual rights. Nothing more - and nothing less.
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I can accept anything, except what seems to be the easiest for most people: the half-way, the almost, the just-about, the in-between.
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Money is just a tool. It will take you anywhere you want, but you have to be the driver
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