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We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality

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
Consequence
Liberty
Economic
Reality
Cannot
Evading
Evade
Oil
Consequences

More quotes by Ayn Rand

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Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman's tool is values the bureaucrat's tool is fear.
Ayn Rand
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If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man's only moral commandment is: Thou shalt think. But a 'moral commandment' is a contradiction in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.
Ayn Rand
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Why do they always teach us that it's easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It's the hardest thing in the world--to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want.
Ayn Rand
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Life is a value to be bought and thinking is the only coin noble enough to buy it.
Ayn Rand
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Only a man of integrity can possess the virtue of honesty, since only the faking of one’s consciousness can permit the faking of existence.
Ayn Rand
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but their eyes were as cold blue glass buttons.
Ayn Rand
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A building has integrity, just as a man and just as seldom! It must be true to its own idea, have its own form, and serve its own purpose!
Ayn Rand
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An emotion as much tells you nothing about reality, beyond the fact that something makes you feel something.
Ayn Rand
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If you want to feel good, be rational.
Ayn Rand
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To demand 'sense' is the hallmark of nonsense. Nature does not make sense. Nothing makes sense.
Ayn Rand
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The charming aspect of Christmas is the fact that it expresses good will in a cheerful, happy, benevolent, non-sacrificial way. One says: “Merry Christmas”-not “Weep and Repent.” And the good will is expressed in a material, earthly form-by giving presents to one's friends, or by sending them cards in token of remembrance . . . .
Ayn Rand
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It is my eyes which see, and the sight of my eyes grants beauty to the earth.
Ayn Rand
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Love, friendship, respect, admiration are the emotional response of one man to the virtues of another, the spiritual payment given in exchange for the personal, selfish pleasure which one man derives from the virtues of another man’s character.
Ayn Rand
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An idea is a light turned on in a man's soul. Comic-strip artists are in the habit of representing it by means of a light bulb flashing on, above the head of a character who has suddenly grasped an idea. In simple, primitive terms, this is an appropriate symbol.
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.
Ayn Rand
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Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another--their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.
Ayn Rand
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I am opposed to all forms of control. I am for an absolute, laissez-faire, free, unregulated economy.
Ayn Rand
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The view that man was ever to be drawn by some vision of the unattainable shining ahead, doomed ever to aspire, but not to achieve, my life and my values could not bring me to that.
Ayn Rand
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Since time immemorial and pre-industrial, 'greed' has been the accusation hurled at the rich by the concrete-bound illiterates who were unable to conceive of the source of wealth or of the motivation of those who produce it.
Ayn Rand
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Statism needs war a free country does not. Statism survives by looting a free country survives by producing.
Ayn Rand