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I take no pride in hopeless longing I wouldn't hold a stillborn aspiration. I'd want to have it, to make it, to live it.

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
Hold
Live
Take
Make
Aspiration
Hopeless
Longing
Pride
Wouldn

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You'd let the whole world perish rather than soil that immaculate self of yours with a single spot of which you'd have to be ashamed.
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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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Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another--their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.
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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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I don't wish to be the symbol of anything. I'm only myself.
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Identify the dominant philosophy of a society and you can predict its future.
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Action without thought is mindlessness, and thought without action is hypocritical.
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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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Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.
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She's a writer. The kind of writer who wouldn't be published outside. She believes that when one deals with words, one deals with the mind.
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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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Through the dry phases of calculations in her mind, she noticed that she did have time to feel something: it was the hard, exhilarating pleasure of action.
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I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.
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Let me be the child in the story and declare that the Emperor is naked — or that America is culturally bankrupt.
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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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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 uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other - until one day when they are suddenly declared to be the country's official ideology.
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No man can use his brain to think for another.
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Don't rely on our knowledge of what's best for your future. We do know, but it can't be best until you know it.
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