Quote

When I listen to a symphony I love, I don't get from it what the composer got. His 'Yes' was different from mine. He could have no concern for mine and no exact conception of it. That answer is too personal to each man. But in giving himself what he wanted, he gave me a great experience.

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
Wanted
Mine
Giving
Concern
Great
Gave
Different
Answer
Symphony
Men
Listen
Exact
Love
Personal
Composer
Answers
Conception
Experience
Mines

More quotes by 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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Fransisco, you're some kind of very high nobility, aren't you? He answered, Not yet. The reason my family has lasted for such a long time is that none of us has ever been permitted to think he is born a d'Anconia. We are expected to become one.
Ayn Rand
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Money is just a tool. It will take you anywhere you want, but you have to be the driver
Ayn Rand
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When one turns from reason to faith, when one rejects the absolutism of reality, one undercuts the absolutism of one's consciousness - and one's mind becomes an organ one cannot trust any longer. It becomes what the mystics claim it to be: a tool of distortion.
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I think, therefore I'll think.
Ayn Rand
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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.
Ayn Rand
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The fortune my spirit is not to be blown into coins of brass and flung to the winds as alms for the poor of the spirit. I guard my treasures: my thought, my will, my freedom. And the greatest of these is freedom.
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Most American men are repressors.
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There’s nothing as significant as a human face. Nor as eloquent. We can never really know another person, except by our first glance at him. Because, in that glance, we know everything. Even though we’re not always wise enough to unravel the knowledge.
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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The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it.
Ayn Rand
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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.
Ayn Rand
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Volumes can be and have been written about the issue of freedom versus dictatorship, but, in essence, it comes down to a single question: do you consider it moral to treat men as sacrificial animals and to rule them by physical force?
Ayn Rand
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A culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiate d masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.
Ayn Rand
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Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.
Ayn Rand
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I want to be prepared to claim the greatest virtue of all - that I was a man who made money
Ayn Rand
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It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money.
Ayn Rand
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If you don't know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn.
Ayn Rand
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The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone.
Ayn Rand
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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.
Ayn Rand