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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.

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
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Independence
Humans
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The government was set to protect man from criminals-and the constitution was written to protect man from the government. The Bill of Rights was not directed at private citizens, but against the government-as an explicit declaration that individual rights supersede any public or social power.
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Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.
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I am unwilling to be wholly good—and please don't regard me as wholly evil!
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Every honest man lives for himself. Every man worth calling a man lives for himself. The one who doesn't - doesn't live at all.
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Man cannot demand that others give up their lives to make him happy.
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All work is an act of philosophy.
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you are never called upon to prove a negative. that's a law of logic.
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The government has created a nation of paper criminals. People can be put in jail and lose civil rights and liberties through bureaucratic procedures.The only thing that is keeping you out of jail is government goodwill.
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One can study what exists and how consciousness functions but one cannot analyze (or “prove”) existence as such, or consciousness as such. These are irreducible primaries. (An attempt to “prove” them is self-contradict ory: it is an attempt to “prove” existence by means of nonexistence, and consciousness by means of unconsciousness .)
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Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind, and a step that travels unlimited roads.
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[Altruism] is a moral system which holds that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the sole justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, value and virtue. This is the moral base of collectivism, of all dictatorships.
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I could die for you. But I couldn't, and wouldn't, live for you.
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A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.
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Any alleged 'right' of one man, which necessitates the violation of the rights of another, is not and cannot be a right.
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Men prosper or fail, survive or perish in proportion to the degree of their rationality.
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God... a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive.
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The degree of a country's freedom is the degree of its prosperity.
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