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In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.

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
Profit
Food
Liberty
Economic
Winning
Evil
Poison
Death
Compromise
Good
Economics

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When you have established that one alternative is good and the other is evil, there is no justification for the choice of a mixture. There is no justification ever for choosing any part of what you know to be evil.
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Show me your achievement, and the knowledge will give me courage for mine.
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Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage-the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterologic al traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry.
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Science was born as a result and consequence of philosophy it cannot survive without a philosophical base. If philosophy perishes, science will be next to go.
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As long as men are free to speak, a small, rational minority will always prevail over an irrational majority.
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Any group or collective, large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members.
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When a man declares: There are no blacks and whites [in morality] he is making a psychological confession, and what he means is: I am unwilling to be wholly good - and please don't regard me as wholly evil!
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The only proper, moral purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence - to protect his right to his own life, to his own liberty, to his own property and to the pursuit of his own happiness. Without property rights, no other rights are possible.
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Independence is the only gauge of human virtue and value. What a man is and makes of himself not what he has or hasn’t done for others. There is no substitute for personal dignity.
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Ideas, in a free society, are not a crime- and neither can they serve as the justification of a crime.
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The great creators-the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors-stood alone against the men of their time.
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To interpose the threat of physical destruction between a man and his perception of reality, is to negate and paralyze his means of survival to force him to act against his own judgment, is like forcing him to act against his own sight
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Pleasure is nought but virtue's gayer name-- I wrong her still, I rate her worth too low: Virtue the root, and pleasure is the flow'r.
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Inflation is not caused by the actions of private citizens, but by the government: by an artificial expansion of the money supply required to support deficit spending. No private embezzlers or bank robbers in history have ever plundered people's savings on a scale comparable to the plunder perpetrated by the fiscal policies of statist governments.
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I've always thought that a feeling which changes never existed in the first place.
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Words are a lens to focus one's mind.
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If you don't know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn.
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I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline.
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We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality
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Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever.
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