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When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is learning to understand and control the behavior of crop plants and domestic animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized.

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
Literature
Civilized
Understand
Believing
Become
Plant
Crop
May
Animals
Crops
Wells
Behavior
Learns
Well
Learning
Domestic
Believe
Control
Justified
Men
Animal
Plants

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To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That's what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul - would you understand why that's much harder?
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Freedom of association includes the freedom not to associate.
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Great men can't be ruled.
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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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The conservatives want to rule man's consciousness the liberals, his body.
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All work is an act of philosophy.
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Aquinas brought an Aristotelian view of reason back into European culture, and lighted the way toward the Renaissance.
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The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone.
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Through all the darkness, through all the shame of which men are capable, the spirit of man will remain alive on this earth. It may sleep, but it will awaken. It may wear chains, but it will break through.
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Reason can be fought with reason. How are you going to fight the unreasonable? The trouble with you, my dear, and with most people, is that you don’t have sufficient respect for the senseless. The senseless is the major factor in our lives. You have no chance if it is your enemy.
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When a man attempts to deal with me by force, I answer him, by force.
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Learn to distinguish the difference between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality
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whose steps were a restless substitute for flight.
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Civilization does not have to perish. The brutes are winning only by default.
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You can ignore reality, but you can't ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.
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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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The right to vote is a consequence, not a primary cause, of a free social system - and its value depends on the constitutional structure implementing and strictly delimiting the voters' power unlimited majority rule is an instance of the principle of tyranny.
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Faith is the commitment of one's consciousness to beliefs for which one has no sensory evidence or rational proof. A mystic is a man who treats his feelings as tools of cognition. Faith is the equation of feeling with knowledge.
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There is only one institution that can arrogate to itself the power legally to trade by means of rubber checks: the government. And it is the only institution that can mortgage your future without your knowledge or consent: government securities (and paper money) are promissory notes on future tax receipts, i.e., on your future production.
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A story is an end in itself. It is not written to teach, sell, explain or destroy anything. It is not written even to entertain. It is written as a man is born - an organic whole, dictated only by its own laws and its own necessity - an end in itself, not a means to an end.
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