Quote

What greater wealth is there than to own your life and to spend it on growing? Every living thing must grow. It can't stand still. It must grow or perish.

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
Stills
Grow
Perishing
Still
Wealth
Atlas
Must
Stand
Perish
Thing
Growing
Ownership
Every
Grows
Thrive
Life
Greater
Novelists
Living
Spending
Money
Spend

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There is nothing to take a man’s freedom away from him, save other men.
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God... a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive.
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Love is our response to our highest values. Love is self-enjoyment. The noblest love is born out of admiration of another's values.
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A rational man is guided by his thinking - by a process of Reason - not by his feelings and desires.
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Volumes can be and have been written about the issue of freedom versus dictatorship, but, in essence, it comes down to a single question: do you consider it moral to treat men as sacrificial animals and to rule them by physical force?
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If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man's only moral commandment is: Thou shalt think. But a 'moral commandment' is a contradiction in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.
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Your soul has a single basic function-the act of valuing.
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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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If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing.
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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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Have you noticed that the imbecile always smiles? Man's first frown is the first touch of God on his forehead. The touch of thought.
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Science was born as a result and consequence of philosophy it cannot survive without a philosophical base. If philosophy perishes, science will be next to go.
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We are one...alone...and only...and we love you who are one...alone...and only. We looked into each other's eyes and we knew the breath of a miracle had touched us, and fled, and left us groping vainly. And we felt torn, torn for some word we could not find.
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My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose.
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Today we have discovered the word that could not be said. I
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The most depraved type of human being ... (is) the man without a purpose.
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Whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man's nature and of life's potential.
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I am unwilling to be wholly good—and please don't regard me as wholly evil!
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but their eyes were as cold blue glass buttons.
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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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