Quote

If the rest of them can survive only by destroying us, then why should we wish them to survive? . . . Nothing can make it moral to destroy the best. One can't be punished for being good. One can't be penalized for ability.

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
Good
Destroy
Rest
Moral
Ability
Wish
Penalized
Best
Punished
Nothing
Destroying
Make
Survive

More quotes by Ayn Rand

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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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Live a life as a monument to your soul.
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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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She's a writer. The kind of writer who wouldn't be published outside. She believes that when one deals with words, one deals with the mind.
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We are one...alone...and only...and we love you who are one...alone...and only. We looked into each other's eyes and we knew the breath of a miracle had touched us, and fled, and left us groping vainly. And we felt torn, torn for some word we could not find.
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Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?
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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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As we gain knowledge, we do not become more certain, we become certain of more.
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In a free society, one does not have to deal with those who are irrational. One is free to avoid them.
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Great men can't be ruled.
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Let no man posture as an advocate of peace if he proposes or supports any social system that initiates the use of force against individual men, in any form.
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Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.
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My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.
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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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I am interested in politics only in order to secure and protect freedom.
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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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All depressions are caused by government interference and the cure is always offered to take more of the poison that caused the disaster. Depressions are not the result of a free economy.
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Money is the root of all good.
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We didn't really have to take everything so seriously, did we?
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Within the extent of your knowledge, you are right.
Ayn Rand