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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
Asks
Waiting
Heaven
Whether
Sith
Dream
Thrive
Earth
Graves
Greatness
Atheism

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We are one...alone...and only...and we love you who are one...alone...and only. We looked into each other's eyes and we knew the breath of a miracle had touched us, and fled, and left us groping vainly. And we felt torn, torn for some word we could not find.
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To say 'I love you' one must first be able to say the 'I.'
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The problem is not those who dream, but those who can only dream.
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Man cannot demand that others give up their lives to make him happy.
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My greatest personal mistake is ever to allow a word or moment that “doesn’t count,” i.e., that I do not refer to my own basic principles. Every word, every action, every moment counts. (This is the pattern on which everybody makes mistakes [or] becomes irrational — not relating their one action or one conviction to another.
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He stepped to the window and pointed to the skyscrapers of the city. He said that we had to extinguish the lights of the world, and when we would see the lights of New York go out, we would know that our job was done.
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There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.
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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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Style is not an end in itself, it is only a means to an end - the means of telling a story.
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Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy.
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The causes of illusions are not pretty to discover. They're either vicious or tragic.
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There is no such dichotomy as 'human rights' versus 'property rights.' No human rights can exist without property rights.
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Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably the man who respects it has earned it.
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...if men are to be ruled, then the enemy is reason.
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Inflation is not caused by the actions of private citizens, but by the government: by an artificial expansion of the money supply required to support deficit spending. No private embezzlers or bank robbers in history have ever plundered people's savings on a scale comparable to the plunder perpetrated by the fiscal policies of statist governments.
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The action required to sustain human life is primarily intellectual everything man needs has to be discovered by his mind and produced by his effort.
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Whatever road I take, the guiding star is within me the guiding star and the loadstone which point the way. They point in but one direction. They point to me.
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It is futile to fight against, if one does not know what one is fighting for.
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Do not consider Collectivists as sincere but deluded idealists. The proposal to enslave some men for the sake of others is not an ideal brutality is not idealistic, no matter what its purpose. Do not ever say that the desire to do good by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.
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I don't build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.
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