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One loses everything when one loses one's sense of humor.

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
Fountainhead
Humor
Loses
Sense
Everything

More quotes by Ayn Rand

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There is only one institution that can arrogate to itself the power legally to trade by means of rubber checks: the government. And it is the only institution that can mortgage your future without your knowledge or consent: government securities (and paper money) are promissory notes on future tax receipts, i.e., on your future production.
Ayn Rand
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the worst wars are religious wars between sects of the same religion or civil wars between brothers of the same race.
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Learn to distinguish the difference between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality
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The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren
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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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Poverty is not a mortgage on the labor of others-misfortu ne is not a mortgage on achievement-fai lure is not a mortgage on success-sufferi ng is not a claim check, and its relief is not the goal of existence-man is not a sacrificial animal on anyone’s altar nor for anyone’s cause-life is not one huge hospital.
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No man can use his brain to think for another.
Ayn Rand
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Capitalism and altruism are incompatible they are philosophical opposites they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society.
Ayn Rand
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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.
Ayn Rand
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No man can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation , an unrewarded duty or an involuntary servitude on another man. There can be no such thing as the right to enslave .
Ayn Rand
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What is kinder--to believe the best of people and burden them with a nobility beyond their endurance--or to see them as they are, and accept it because it makes them comfortable?
Ayn Rand
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A moment or an eternity—did it matter? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist.
Ayn Rand
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Whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man's nature and of life's potential.
Ayn Rand
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It is a policeman’s duty to retrieve stolen property and return it to its owners. But when robbery becomes the purpose of the law, and the policeman’s duty becomes, not protection, but the plunder of property - then it is an outlaw who has to become a policeman.
Ayn Rand
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Emotions are not tools of cognition. They tell you nothing about the nature of reality.
Ayn Rand
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I guard my treasures: my thoughts, my will, my freedom. And the greatest of these is freedom.
Ayn Rand
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Ever since Kant divorced reason from reality, his intellectual descendants have been diligently widening the breach.
Ayn Rand
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Political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom a free mind and a free market are corollaries.
Ayn Rand
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There is a fundamental conviction which some people never acquire, some hold only in their youth, and a few hold to the end of their days-the conviction that ideas matter . . . . That ideas matter means that knowledge matters, that truth matters, that one's mind matters . . .
Ayn Rand
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It is true that the welfare-statists are not socialists, that they never advocated or intended the socialization of private property, that they want to 'preserve' private property-with government control of its use and disposal. But that is the fundamental characteristic of fascism.
Ayn Rand