Quote

I want to know that I've accomplished something. I want to feel that it had some meaning. At the last summing up, I want to be sure it wasn't all-for nothing.

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
Feel
Summing
Feels
Accomplished
Something
Meaning
Wasn
Sure
Lasts
Last
Nothing

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There is nothing to take a man’s freedom away from him, save other men.
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Man is a being with free will therefore, each man is potentially good or evil, and it's up to him and only him (through his reasoning mind) to decide which he wants to be.
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People are not embracing collectivism because they have accepted bad economics. They are accepting bad economics because they have embraced collectivism.
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My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists - and in a single choice: to live.
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To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one's thinking to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one's mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.
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To know one's own desires, their meaning and their costs requires the highest human virtue: rationality.
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She stood at the window, her arms spread wide, holding on to each side of the frame, it was as if she held a piece of the city.
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Hank, this is great. Yes. He said it simply, openly. There was no flattered pleasure in his voice, and no modesty. This, she knew, was a tribute to her, the rarest one person could pay another: the tribute of feeling free to acknowledge one's own greatness, knowing that it is understood.
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My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose.
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There can be no compromise on basic principles. There can be no compromise on moral issues. There can be no compromise on matters of knowledge, of truth, of rational conviction.
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Men prosper or fail, survive or perish in proportion to the degree of their rationality.
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A reader has to be concerned only with the end result unless he chooses to analyze it, he does not have to know by what means that result was achieved-but it is my job to know.
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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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Faith and force ... are corollaries: every period of history dominated by mysticism, was a period of statism, of dictatorship, of tyranny.
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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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A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race - and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin.
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Value is that which one acts to gain and/or keep. Virtue is the act by which one aims and/or keeps it.
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Rights are not a matter of numbers - and there can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob.
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Show me your achievement, and the knowledge will give me courage for mine.
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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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