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Genius is an exaggeration of dimension. So is elephantiasis. Both may be only a disease.

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
Genius
May
Exaggeration
Dimension
Dimensions
Disease

More quotes by Ayn Rand

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I got the idea [for Anthem's theme] in my school days, in Soviet Russia, when I heard all the vicious attacks on individualism, and asked myself what the world would be like if men lost the word 'I.'
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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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Those who say theory and practice are two unrelated realms are fools in one and scoundrels in the other.
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It is a policeman’s duty to retrieve stolen property and return it to its owners. But when robbery becomes the purpose of the law, and the policeman’s duty becomes, not protection, but the plunder of property - then it is an outlaw who has to become a policeman.
Ayn Rand
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and he said her name to fill the space of five years.
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It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money.
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Aquinas brought an Aristotelian view of reason back into European culture, and lighted the way toward the Renaissance.
Ayn Rand
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Faith and force ... are corollaries: every period of history dominated by mysticism, was a period of statism, of dictatorship, of tyranny.
Ayn Rand
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Truth is the recognition of reality reason, man's only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.
Ayn Rand
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They talked about nothing in particular, sentences that had meaning only in the sound of the voices, in warm gaiety, in the ease of complete relaxation.
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Without property rights, no other rights are possible.
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The degree of a country's freedom is the degree of its prosperity.
Ayn Rand
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Hank, this is great. Yes. He said it simply, openly. There was no flattered pleasure in his voice, and no modesty. This, she knew, was a tribute to her, the rarest one person could pay another: the tribute of feeling free to acknowledge one's own greatness, knowing that it is understood.
Ayn Rand
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Thinking men cannot be ruled ambitious men do not stagnate.
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Creation comes before distribution - or there will be nothing to distribute. The need of the creator comes before the need of any possible beneficiary. Yet we are taught to admire the second-hander who dispenses gifts he has not produced above the man who made the gifts possible. We praise an act of charity. We shrug at an act of achievement.
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Ah, there's nothing like tea in the afternoon. When the British Empire collapses, historians will find that it had made but two invaluable contributions to civilization - this tea ritual and the detective novel.
Ayn Rand
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Do not keep silent when your own ideas and values are being attacked. If a dictatorship ever comes to this country, it will be by the fault of those who keep silent. We are still free enough to speak. Do we have time? No one can tell.
Ayn Rand
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A rational process is a moral process.
Ayn Rand
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She fell asleep, lying there, her hand clasping his. Her last awareness, before she surrendered the responsibility of consciousness, was the sense of an enormous void, the void of a city and of a continent, where she would never be able to find the man whom she had no right to seek.
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That an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error.
Ayn Rand