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The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.

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
Life
Humor
Teach
Dies
Suffering
Purpose
Happiness
Objectivism
Enjoy
Suffer
Live
Morality

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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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Pleasure is nought but virtue's gayer name-- I wrong her still, I rate her worth too low: Virtue the root, and pleasure is the flow'r.
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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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This god, this one word: I.
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What is morality, she asked. Judgement to distinguish right and wrong, vision to see the truth, and courage to act upon it, dedication to that which is good, integrity to stand by the good at any price.
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It stands to reason that if sacrifices are being given, somebody is collecting sacrifices.
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Creation comes before distribution - or there will be nothing to distribute. The need of the creator comes before the need of any possible beneficiary. Yet we are taught to admire the second-hander who dispenses gifts he has not produced above the man who made the gifts possible. We praise an act of charity. We shrug at an act of achievement.
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She did not know the nature of her loneliness. The only words that named it were: This is not the world I expected.
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Sacrifice does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious
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There is nothing to take a man’s freedom away from him, save other men.
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To know one's own desires, their meaning and their costs requires the highest human virtue: rationality.
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I don't build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.
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Love is not self-sacrifice, but the most profound assertion of your own needs and values. It is for your own happiness that you need the person you love, and that is the greatest compliment, the greatest tribute you can pay to that person.
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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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Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth, the man who would make his fortune no matter where he started.
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Why do they always teach us that it's easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It's the hardest thing in the world--to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want.
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Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever.
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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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A 'whim' is a desire experienced by a person who does not know and does not care to discover its cause.
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The Founding Fathers were neither passive, death-worshipin g mystics nor mindless, power-seeking looters as a political group they were a phenomenon unprecedented in history: they were thinkers who were also men of action.
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