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You'd let the whole world perish rather than soil that immaculate self of yours with a single spot of which you'd have to be ashamed.

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
Whole
Perish
World
Spot
Spots
Ashamed
Soil
Single
Rather
Self
Immaculate

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There are no evil thoughts except one the refusal to think.
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One can't love man without hating most of the creatures who pretend to bear his name.
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She knew that she could not have reached this white serenity except as the sum of all the colors, of all the violence she had known.
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Thousands of years ago the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burnt at the stake he'd taught his brothers to light, but he left them a gift they had not conceived and he lifted darkness from the face of the Earth.
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The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren
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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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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.
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He despised causeless affection, just as he despised unearned wealth. They professed to love him for some unknown reason and they ignored all the things for which he could wish to be loved.
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When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is learning to understand and control the behavior of crop plants and domestic animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized.
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Many words have been granted me, and some are wise, and some are false, but only three are holy: I will it!
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Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it's yours.
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Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.
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Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting for us in our graves - or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.
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I feel that others live up to me, if they want me.
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The government was set to protect man from criminals-and the constitution was written to protect man from the government. The Bill of Rights was not directed at private citizens, but against the government-as an explicit declaration that individual rights supersede any public or social power.
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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
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Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.
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A man's rights are not violated by a private individual's refusal to deal with him.
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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.
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No one's happiness but my own is in my power to achieve or to destroy.
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