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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
Dimension
Dimensions
Disease
Genius
May
Exaggeration

More quotes by Ayn Rand

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Man has a single basic choice: to think or not, and that is the gauge of his virtue. Moral perfection is an unbreached rationality-not the degree of your intelligence, but the full and relentless use of your mind, not the extent of your knowledge, but the acceptance of reason as an absolute.
Ayn Rand
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I take no pride in hopeless longing I wouldn't hold a stillborn aspiration. I'd want to have it, to make it, to live it.
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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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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.
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Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.
Ayn Rand
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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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The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other - until one day when they are suddenly declared to be the country's official ideology.
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I am unwilling to be wholly good—and please don't regard me as wholly evil!
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The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life.
Ayn Rand
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If, before undertaking some action, you must obtain the permission of society-you are not free, whether such permission is granted to you or not. Only a slave acts on permission. A permission is not a right.
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A 'whim' is a desire experienced by a person who does not know and does not care to discover its cause.
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Creation comes before distribution -- or there will be nothing to distribute.
Ayn Rand
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You don't know how hard I've tried to be left standing all by myself.
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Most American men are repressors.
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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 story is an end in itself. It is not written to teach, sell, explain or destroy anything. It is not written even to entertain. It is written as a man is born - an organic whole, dictated only by its own laws and its own necessity - an end in itself, not a means to an end.
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Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed.
Ayn Rand
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There are no evil thoughts except one the refusal to think.
Ayn Rand
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I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline.
Ayn Rand
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She thought: at this moment, the glass stem between his fingers feels just like the one between mine. We have this much in common.
Ayn Rand