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Only a man of integrity can possess the virtue of honesty, since only the faking of one’s consciousness can permit the faking of existence.

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
Possess
Honesty
Integrity
Consciousness
Virtue
Since
Existence
Faking
Men
Permit

More quotes by Ayn Rand

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Psychologically, the choice to think or not is the choice to focus or not. Existentially, the choice to focus or not is the choice to be conscious or not. Metaphysically, the choice to be conscious or not is the choice of life or death.
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Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?
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I cannot stand Tolstoy, and reading him was the most boring literary duty I ever had to perform, his philosophy and his sense of life are not merely mistaken, but evil, and yet, from a purely literary viewpoint, on his own terms, I have to evaluate him as a good writer.
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Morally, the promise of an impossible “right” to economic security is an infamous attempt to abrogate the concept of rights. It can and does mean only one thing: a promise to enslave the men who produce, for the benefit of those who don’t.
Ayn Rand
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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.
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Love is our response to our highest values.
Ayn Rand
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I guard my treasures: my thoughts, my will, my freedom. And the greatest of these is freedom.
Ayn Rand
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Without property rights, no other rights are possible.
Ayn Rand
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And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride. This god, this one word: 'I.
Ayn Rand
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You don't build for the way people live, but for the way they should live. I don't write about people as they are, but as they could be and should be.
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One can't love man without hating most of the creatures who pretend to bear his name.
Ayn Rand
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In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that man’s proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads.
Ayn Rand
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No speech is ever considered, but only the speaker. It's so much easier to pass judgement on a man than on an idea.
Ayn Rand
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It is not advisable to venture unsolicited opinions. You should spare yourself the embarrassing discovery of their exact value to your listener.
Ayn Rand
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When you have civilized men fighting savages, you support the civilized men, no matter who they are.
Ayn Rand
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The writer who develops a beautiful style, but has nothing to say, represents a kind of arrested esthetic development he is like a pianist who acquires a brilliant technique by playing finger-exercises, but never gives a concert.
Ayn Rand
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Self-esteem is reliance on one's power to think... The man of authentic self-confidence is the man who relies on the judgment of his own mind.
Ayn Rand
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What whip lashed them to their knees in shame and submission? The worship of the word We.
Ayn Rand
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When one turns from reason to faith, when one rejects the absolutism of reality, one undercuts the absolutism of one's consciousness - and one's mind becomes an organ one cannot trust any longer. It becomes what the mystics claim it to be: a tool of distortion.
Ayn Rand
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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.
Ayn Rand