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He walked, groping for a sentence that hung in his mind as an empty shape. He could neither fill it or dismiss 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
Sentences
Shape
Shapes
Groping
Neither
Dismiss
Empty
Hung
Mind
Sentence
Walked
Fill

More quotes by Ayn Rand

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All the evils, abuses, and iniquities, popularly ascribed to businessmen and to capitalism, were not caused by an unregulated economy or by a free market, but by government intervention into the economy.
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Art is the indispensable medium for the communication of a moral ideal.
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Thinking men cannot be ruled ambitious men do not stagnate.
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A mystic is a man who treats his feelings as tools of cognition.
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Selfishness does not mean only to do things for one's self. One may do things, affecting others, for his own pleasure and benefit. This is not immoral, but the highest of morality.
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Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artists metaphysical value judgments.
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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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Love is an expression and assertion of self-esteem, a response to one's own values in the person of another. One gains a profoundly personal, selfish joy from the mere existence of the person one loves. It is one's own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns, and derives from love.
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I am an innovator. This is a term of distinction, a term of honor, rather than something to hide or apologize for. Anyone who has new or valuable ideas to offer stands outside the intellectual status quo. But the status quo is not a stream, let alone a 'mainstream'. It is a stagnant swamp. It is the innovators who carry mankind forward.
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But a few understand that building is a great symbol we live in our minds, and existence is the attempt to bring that life into physical reality, to state it in gesture and form. For the man who understands this, a house he owns is a statement of his life.
Ayn Rand
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The man without a purpose is a man who drifts at the mercy of random feelings or unidentified urges and is capable of any evil, because he is totally out of control of his own life. In order to be in control of your life, you have to have a purpose-a productive purpose.
Ayn Rand
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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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Virtue is not an end in itself. Virtue is not its own reward or sacrificial fodder for the reward of evil. Life is the reward of virtue-and happiness is the goal and the reward of life.
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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Faith is the commitment of one's consciousness to beliefs for which one has no sensory evidence or rational proof. A mystic is a man who treats his feelings as tools of cognition. Faith is the equation of feeling with knowledge.
Ayn Rand
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The right to life means that a man has the right to support his life by his own work (on any economic level, as high as his ability will carry him) it does not mean that others must provide him with the necessities of life.
Ayn Rand
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When you force a man to act against his own choice and judgment, it's his thinking that you want him to suspend.
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No one's happiness but my own is in my power to achieve or to destroy.
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The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone.
Ayn Rand
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The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren
Ayn Rand