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A desire presupposes the possibility of action to achieve it action presupposes a goal which is worth achieving.

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
Goal
Desire
Inspirational
Presupposes
Action
Achieving
Witty
Possibility
Worth
Achieve

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When you force a man to act against his own choice and judgment, it's his thinking that you want him to suspend.
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Without property rights, no other rights are possible.
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Reality confronts man with a great many musts, but all of them are conditional the formula of realistic necessity is You must, if and the if stands for man's choice
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God... a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive.
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Psychologically, the choice to think or not is the choice to focus or not. Existentially, the choice to focus or not is the choice to be conscious or not. Metaphysically, the choice to be conscious or not is the choice of life or death.
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And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride. This god, this one word: 'I.
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Since time immemorial and pre-industrial, 'greed' has been the accusation hurled at the rich by the concrete-bound illiterates who were unable to conceive of the source of wealth or of the motivation of those who produce it.
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The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word 'selfishness' is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual 'package-deal,' which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind.
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Those who say theory and practice are two unrelated realms are fools in one and scoundrels in the other.
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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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They talked about nothing in particular, sentences that had meaning only in the sound of the voices, in warm gaiety, in the ease of complete relaxation.
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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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Humor is not an unconditional virtue its moral character depends on its object. To laugh at the contemptible, is a virtue to laugh at the good, is a hideous vice. Too often, humor is used as the camouflage of moral cowardice.
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I will not die, it's the world that will end. paraphrase of unknown philosopher
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That which is not worth contemplating in life, is not worth recreating in art.
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In a capitalist society, all human relationships are voluntary. Men are free to cooperate or not, to deal with one another or not, as their own individual judgments, convictions and interests dictate.
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I can say-not as a patriotic bromide, but with full knowledge of the necessary metaphysical, epistemological , ethical, political and esthetic roots-that the United States of America is the greatest, the noblest and, in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world.
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When you have civilized men fighting savages, you support the civilized men, no matter who they are.
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The great creators-the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors-stood alone against the men of their time.
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You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.
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