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Rationalization is a process of not perceiving reality, but of attempting to make reality fit one’s emotions.

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
Emotions
Excuse
Fit
Emotion
Process
Reality
Rationalization
Make
Perceiving
Attempting

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There are two side to every issue.
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Fransisco, you're some kind of very high nobility, aren't you? He answered, Not yet. The reason my family has lasted for such a long time is that none of us has ever been permitted to think he is born a d'Anconia. We are expected to become one.
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A culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiate d masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.
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We didn't really have to take everything so seriously, did we?
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There is a fundamental conviction which some people never acquire, some hold only in their youth, and a few hold to the end of their days-the conviction that ideas matter . . . . That ideas matter means that knowledge matters, that truth matters, that one's mind matters . . .
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Love should be treated like a business deal, but every business deal has its own terms and its own currency. And in love, the currency is virtue. You love people not for what you do for them or what they do for you. You love them for the values, the virtues, which they have achieved in their own character.
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You know, I think that only if one feels immensely important can one feel truly light.
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That something happened to you is of no importance to anyone, not even to you. The important thing about you is what you choose to make happen - your values and choices. That which happened by accident - what family you were born into, in what country, and where you went to school - is totally unimportant.
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There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.
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Indiscriminate tolerance and indiscriminate condemnation are not two opposites: they are two variants of the same evasion.
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Sacrifice is the surrender of that which you value in favor of which you dont
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The quickest way to kill the human spirit is to ask someone to do mediocre work.
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