Quote

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
Pride
Wouldn
Hold
Live
Take
Make
Aspiration
Hopeless
Longing

More quotes by Ayn Rand

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It was the greatest sensation of existence: not to trust but to know.
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Integrity is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your consciousness, just as honesty is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake existence.
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Independence is the only gauge of human virtue and value. What a man is and makes of himself not what he has or hasn’t done for others. There is no substitute for personal dignity.
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There's only one passion in most artists more violent than their desire for admiration: their fear of identifying the nature of such admiration as they do receive.
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There were things in my past which I have not liked. But all the things of which I was proud will remain.
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Romantic art is the fuel and the spark plug of a Man's soul. It's task is to set a soul on fire and never let it go out.
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A desire presupposes the possibility of action to achieve it action presupposes a goal which is worth achieving.
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Guilt is altruism's stock in trade, and the inducing of guilt is its only means of self-perpetuati on.
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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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The problem is not those who dream, but those who can only dream.
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Man has a single basic choice: to think or not, and that is the gauge of his virtue. Moral perfection is an unbreached rationality-not the degree of your intelligence, but the full and relentless use of your mind, not the extent of your knowledge, but the acceptance of reason as an absolute.
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A rational process is a moral process.
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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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Learn to value yourself, which means: fight for your happiness.
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Her face lay still on the air under his face.
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A rational man knows-or makes it a point to discover-the source of his emotions, the basic premises from which they come.
Ayn Rand
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I hold that such a question can never arise except in a society of cannibals.
Ayn Rand
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If a drought strikes them, animals perish--man builds irrigation canals if a flood strikes them, animals perish--man builds dams if a carnivorous pack attacks them, animals perish--man writes the Constitution of the United States.
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What is kinder--to believe the best of people and burden them with a nobility beyond their endurance--or to see them as they are, and accept it because it makes them comfortable?
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Do you know that my personal crusade in life (in the philosophical sense) is not merely to fight collectivism, nor to fight altruism? These are only consequences, effects, not causes. I am out after the real cause, the real root of evil on earth the irrational.
Ayn Rand