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Serenity comes from the ability to say “Yes” to existence. Courage comes from the ability to say “No” to the wrong choices made by others.

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
Existence
Choices
Wrong
Ability
Comes
Serenity
Others
Bravery
Made
Novelists
Courage

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Through all the darkness, through all the shame of which men are capable, the spirit of man will remain alive on this earth. It may sleep, but it will awaken. It may wear chains, but it will break through.
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When one turns from reason to faith, when one rejects the absolutism of reality, one undercuts the absolutism of one's consciousness - and one's mind becomes an organ one cannot trust any longer. It becomes what the mystics claim it to be: a tool of distortion.
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America's abundance was not created by public sacrifices to the common good, but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes.
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Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.
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Love is our response to our highest values.
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Emotions are inherent in your nature, but their content is dictated by your mind. Your emotional capacity is an empty motor, and your values are the fuel with which your mind fills it.
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My dear fellow, who will let you? That's not the point. The point is, who will stop me?
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This was the great clarity of being beyond emotion, after the reward of having felt everything one could feel.
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The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man's self-defense, and, as such, may only resort to force only against those who start the use of force.
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I have no faith at all. I only hold convictions.
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No man can use his brain to think for another.
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When the common good of a society is regarded as something apart from and superior to the individual good of its members, it means that the good of some men takes precedence over the good of others, with those others consigned to the status of sacrificial animals.
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He, too, stood looking at her for a moment - and it seemed to her that it was not a look of greeting after an absence, but the look of someone who had thought of her every day of that year. She could not be certain, it was only an instant, so brief that just as she caught it, he was turning.
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Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another--their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.
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Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values.
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A good quotation must be a complete entity. It must be like a headline - sharp, clear, whole.
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To say 'I love you' one must first be able to say the 'I.'
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Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone.
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The word which can never die on this earth, for it is the heart of it and the meaning and the glory. The sacred word: EGO.
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You were not born to be a second-hander. Howard Roark to Gail Wynand in The Fountainhead
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