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Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman's tool is values the bureaucrat's tool is fear.

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
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Exercised
Political
Negative
Injury
Incentive
Power
Positive
Punishment
Bureaucrats
Mean
Value
Rewards
Payment
Men
Liberty
Economics
Incentives
Economic
Capitalism
Businessman
Values
Threat
Offering
Bureaucrat
Fear
Destruction
Reward
Imprisonment

More quotes by Ayn Rand

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A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.
Ayn Rand
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Your emotional capacity is an empty motor, and your values are the fuel with which your mind fills it. If you choose a mix of contradictions, it will clog your motor, corrode your transmission and wreck you on your first attempt to move with a machine which you, the driver, have corrupted.
Ayn Rand
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He stepped to the window and pointed to the skyscrapers of the city. He said that we had to extinguish the lights of the world, and when we would see the lights of New York go out, we would know that our job was done.
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You were not born to be a second-hander. Howard Roark to Gail Wynand in The Fountainhead
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Since time immemorial and pre-industrial, 'greed' has been the accusation hurled at the rich by the concrete-bound illiterates who were unable to conceive of the source of wealth or of the motivation of those who produce it.
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The desire not to be anything is the desire not to be.
Ayn Rand
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To interpose the threat of physical destruction between a man and his perception of reality, is to negate and paralyze his means of survival to force him to act against his own judgment, is like forcing him to act against his own sight
Ayn Rand
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I am opposed to all forms of control. I am for an absolute, laissez-faire, free, unregulated economy.
Ayn Rand
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Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.
Ayn Rand
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The age of the skyscraper is gone. This is the age of the housing project. Which is always a prelude to the age of the cave.
Ayn Rand
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If you tell an ugly woman that she is beautiful, you offer her the great homage of corrupting the concept of beauty.
Ayn Rand
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To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. That is freedom. That and nothing else.
Ayn Rand
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The man who produces while others dispose of his product is a slave.
Ayn Rand
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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.
Ayn Rand
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every man is free to rise as far as he's able or willing, but the degree to which he thinks determines the degree to which he'll rise.
Ayn Rand
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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.
Ayn Rand
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I want it real. I want to know that there is someone, somewhere, who wants it, too. Or else what is the use of seeing it, and working, and burning oneself for an impossible vision? A spirit, too, needs fuel. It can run dry
Ayn Rand
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The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind
Ayn Rand
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If a dedication page were to precede the total of my work, it would read: To the glory of Man.
Ayn Rand
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The skyline of New York is a monument of a splendour that no pyramids or palaces will ever equal or approach.
Ayn Rand