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Do not ever say that the desire to 'do good' by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.
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
Stupid
Motives
Peace
Antiwar
Force
Lust
Desire
Motive
War
Libertarian
Power
Stupidity
Ever
Good
Neither
More quotes by Ayn Rand
Compromise now, because you'll have to later, anyway, only then you'll have gone through things you'll wish you hadn't.
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Man is a being with free will therefore, each man is potentially good or evil, and it's up to him and only him (through his reasoning mind) to decide which he wants to be.
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Courage and confidence are practical necessities . . . courage is the practical form of being true to existence, of being true to truth, and confidence is the practical form of being true to one’s own consciousness.
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The creator's concern is the conquest of nature. The parasite's concern is the conquest of men.
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A culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiate d masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.
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One must differentiate between one's thoughts and one's emotions with full clarity and precision...No discussion, cooperation, agreement, or understanding is possible among men who substitute emotion for proof.
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I cannot stand Tolstoy, and reading him was the most boring literary duty I ever had to perform, his philosophy and his sense of life are not merely mistaken, but evil, and yet, from a purely literary viewpoint, on his own terms, I have to evaluate him as a good writer.
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Romantic art is always stylized: the better the art, the cleaner and more attractive and intelligent the stylization.
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The fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.
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Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values.
Ayn Rand
If a dedication page were to precede the total of my work, it would read: To the glory of Man.
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It is one's own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns, and derives from love.
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If you don't know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn.
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Collectivism requires self-sacrifice, the subordination of one's interests to those of others.
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America's founding Ideal was the principle of individual rights. Nothing more - and nothing less.
Ayn Rand
Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others.
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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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You have no choice about your capacity to feel that something is good for you or evil, but what you will consider good or evil, what will give you joy or pain, what you will love or hate, desire or fear, depends on your standard of value.
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When one turns from reason to faith, when one rejects the absolutism of reality, one undercuts the absolutism of one's consciousness - and one's mind becomes an organ one cannot trust any longer. It becomes what the mystics claim it to be: a tool of distortion.
Ayn Rand
A quest for self-respect is proof of its lack
Ayn Rand
