Quote

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.

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
Spirit
Winds
Thought
Guard
Treasure
Flung
Fortune
Alms
Wind
Brass
Greatest
Treasures
Poor
Blown
Freedom
Coins

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Any refusal to recognize reality, for any reason whatever, has disastrous consequences. There are no evil thoughts except one: the refusal to think. Don't ignore your own desires.... Don't sacrifice them. Examine their cause. There is a limit to how much you should have to bear.
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I don't build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.
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If you know that this life is all that you have, wouldn't you make the most of it?
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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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I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
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The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind
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[Altruism] is a moral system which holds that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the sole justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, value and virtue. This is the moral base of collectivism, of all dictatorships.
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It is a policeman’s duty to retrieve stolen property and return it to its owners. But when robbery becomes the purpose of the law, and the policeman’s duty becomes, not protection, but the plunder of property - then it is an outlaw who has to become a policeman.
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That which is not worth contemplating in life, is not worth recreating in art.
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All work is an act of philosophy.
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Collectivism requires self-sacrifice, the subordination of one's interests to those of others.
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Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.
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Honor is self-esteem made visible in action.
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The social system based on and consonant with the altruist morality-with the code of self-sacrifice- is socialism, in all or any of its variants: fascism, Nazism, communism. All of them treat man as a sacrificial animal to be immolated for the benefit of the group, the tribe, the society, the state.
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An emotion is an automatic response, an automatic effect of man's value premises. An effect, not a cause. There is no necessary clash, no dichotomy between man's reason and his emotions
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