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Man's unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself.

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
However
Survives
Animal
Background
Men
Reward
Backgrounds
Survive
Rewards
Animals
Unique
Adjusting

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If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing.
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If men want to oppose war, it is statism that they must oppose.
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The fortune my spirit is not to be blown into coins of brass and flung to the winds as alms for the poor of the spirit. I guard my treasures: my thought, my will, my freedom. And the greatest of these is freedom.
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Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman's tool is values the bureaucrat's tool is fear.
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Indiscriminate tolerance and indiscriminate condemnation are not two opposites: they are two variants of the same evasion. To declare that “everybody is white” or “everybody is black” or “everybody is neither white nor black, but gray,” is not a moral judgment, but an escape from the responsibility of moral judgment.
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The only man never to be redeemed is the man without passion.
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Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked: 'Account Overdrawn.'
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There are two side to every issue.
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But a few understand that building is a great symbol we live in our minds, and existence is the attempt to bring that life into physical reality, to state it in gesture and form. For the man who understands this, a house he owns is a statement of his life.
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Compromise does not satisfy, but dissatisfies everybody it does not lead to any general fulfillment, but to general frustration those who try to become everything to all people end up by not being anything to anyone.
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That which is not worth contemplating in life, is not worth recreating in art.
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She had learned, in the slums of her childhood, that honest people were never touchy about the matter of being trusted.
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Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.
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My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.
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If you want to save capitalism there is only one type of argument that you should adopt, the only one that has ever won in any moral issue: the argument from self-esteem. Check your premises, convince yourself of the rightness of your cause, then fight for capitalism with full, moral certainty.
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Honor is self-esteem made visible in action.
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