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I want to be prepared to claim the greatest virtue of all - that I was a man who made money

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
Money
Made
Men
Claim
Claims
Prepared
Greatest
Virtue

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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We [entrepreneurs] required that you leave us free to function -- free to think and work as we choose ... -- free to earn our own profits and make our own fortunes ... Such was the price we asked, which you chose to reject as too high.
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What whip lashed them to their knees in shame and submission? The worship of the word We.
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What is kinder--to believe the best of people and burden them with a nobility beyond their endurance--or to see them as they are, and accept it because it makes them comfortable?
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Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer - and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.
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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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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.
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Don't worry. They're all against me. But I have one advantage: they don't know what they want. I do.
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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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I agree that [marriage] should be treated like a business deal. But every business deal has to have its own terms and its own kind of currency.
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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.
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This was the great clarity of being beyond emotion, after the reward of having felt everything one could feel.
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Value is that which one acts to gain and/or keep. Virtue is the act by which one aims and/or keeps it.
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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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Each man must live as an end in himself and follow his own rational self-interest.
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The truly and deliberately evil men are a very small minority it is the appeaser who unleashes them on mankind.
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Self-esteem is reliance on ones power to think.
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I can accept anything, except what seems to be the easiest for most people: the half-way, the almost, the just-about, the in-between.
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A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race - and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin.
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An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.
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