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The causes of illusions are not pretty to discover. They're either vicious or tragic.

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
Vicious
Tragic
Discover
Illusion
Pretty
Either
Causes
Illusions

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The fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.
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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.
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To demand 'sense' is the hallmark of nonsense. Nature does not make sense. Nothing makes sense.
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Money is the root of all good.
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Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it's yours.
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No speech is ever considered, but only the speaker. It's so much easier to pass judgement on a man than on an idea.
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Statism needs war a free country does not. Statism survives by looting a free country survives by producing.
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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.
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Learn to distinguish the difference between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality
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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 . . .
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There are two side to every issue.
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Any material element or resource which, in order to become of use or value to men, requires the application of human knowledge and effort, should be private property-by the right of those who apply the knowledge and effort.
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Self-esteem is reliance on one's power to think... The man of authentic self-confidence is the man who relies on the judgment of his own mind.
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Most American men are repressors.
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Honor is self-esteem made visible in action.
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Life is a value to be bought and thinking is the only coin noble enough to buy it.
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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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Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting for us in our graves - or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.
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you are never called upon to prove a negative. that's a law of logic.
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Courage and confidence are practical necessities . . . courage is the practical form of being true to existence, of being true to truth, and confidence is the practical form of being true to one’s own consciousness.
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