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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.

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
Worth
Honest
Lives
Doesn
Live
Every
Men
Calling

More quotes by Ayn Rand

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We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.
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Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?
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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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To demand 'sense' is the hallmark of nonsense. Nature does not make sense. Nothing makes sense.
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What do I think of President Reagan? The best answer to give would be: I don't think of him. And the more I see, the less I think.
Ayn Rand
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A building has integrity, just as a man and just as seldom! It must be true to its own idea, have its own form, and serve its own purpose!
Ayn Rand
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Let me be the child in the story and declare that the Emperor is naked — or that America is culturally bankrupt.
Ayn Rand
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Namely, if I am challenging the base of all these institutions, I'm challenging the moral code of altruism. The precept that man's moral duty is to live for others. That man must sacrifice himself to others. Which is the present day morality.
Ayn Rand
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If you tell an ugly woman that she is beautiful, you offer her the great homage of corrupting the concept of beauty.
Ayn Rand
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...if men are to be ruled, then the enemy is reason.
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Politically, the goal of today’s dominant trend is statism. Philosophically, the goal is the obliteration of reason psychologically, it is the erosion of ambition.
Ayn Rand
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The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.
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Collectivism requires self-sacrifice, the subordination of one's interests to those of others.
Ayn Rand
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When you have civilized men fighting savages, you support the civilized men, no matter who they are.
Ayn Rand
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Living in a society, instead of on a desert island, does not relieve a man of the responsibility of supporting his own life.
Ayn Rand
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Remember that rights are moral principles which define and protect a man's freedom of action, but impose no obligations on other men.
Ayn Rand
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I do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and I do not live in chronic dread of disaster. It is no happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that I regard as the abnormal exception in Human Life.
Ayn Rand
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Collectivism, as an intellectual power and a moral ideal, is dead. But freedom and individualism, and their political expression, capitalism, have not yet been discovered.
Ayn Rand
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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.
Ayn Rand
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Guilt is altruism's stock in trade, and the inducing of guilt is its only means of self-perpetuati on.
Ayn Rand