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Integrity is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your consciousness, just as honesty is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake existence.

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
Conscious
Consciousness
Existence
Fact
Facts
Fake
Cannot
Recognition
Honesty
Integrity

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You have no choice about your capacity to feel that something is good for you or evil, but what you will consider good or evil, what will give you joy or pain, what you will love or hate, desire or fear, depends on your standard of value.
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Indiscriminate tolerance and indiscriminate condemnation are not two opposites: they are two variants of the same evasion. To declare that “everybody is white” or “everybody is black” or “everybody is neither white nor black, but gray,” is not a moral judgment, but an escape from the responsibility of moral judgment.
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Don't consider our interests or desires. You have no duty to anyone but yourself.
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I feel that others live up to me, if they want me.
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Faith and force ... are corollaries: every period of history dominated by mysticism, was a period of statism, of dictatorship, of tyranny.
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She fell asleep, lying there, her hand clasping his. Her last awareness, before she surrendered the responsibility of consciousness, was the sense of an enormous void, the void of a city and of a continent, where she would never be able to find the man whom she had no right to seek.
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It's not about who's going to let me it's about who's going to stop me.
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If a life can have a 'theme-song' - and I believe every worthwhile one has - mine is [best] expressed in one word: Individualism.
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Do not set out to write with your eyes on the box office. It can't be done.
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We the Living is not a novel 'about Soviet Russia.' It is a novel about Man against the State. Its basic theme is the sanctity of human life - using the word 'sanctity' not in a mystical sense, but in the sense of 'supreme value.'
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One must differentiate between one's thoughts and one's emotions with full clarity and precision...No discussion, cooperation, agreement, or understanding is possible among men who substitute emotion for proof.
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You can ignore reality, but you can't ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.
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There are two side to every issue.
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Man has a single basic choice: to think or not, and that is the gauge of his virtue. Moral perfection is an unbreached rationality-not the degree of your intelligence, but the full and relentless use of your mind, not the extent of your knowledge, but the acceptance of reason as an absolute.
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In order to deal with reality successfully - to pursue and achieve the values which his life requires - man needs self-esteem he needs to be confident of his efficacy and worth.
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A story is an end in itself. It is not written to teach, sell, explain or destroy anything. It is not written even to entertain. It is written as a man is born - an organic whole, dictated only by its own laws and its own necessity - an end in itself, not a means to an end.
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The view that man was ever to be drawn by some vision of the unattainable shining ahead, doomed ever to aspire, but not to achieve, my life and my values could not bring me to that.
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The action required to sustain human life is primarily intellectual everything man needs has to be discovered by his mind and produced by his effort.
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Do you know that my personal crusade in life (in the philosophical sense) is not merely to fight collectivism, nor to fight altruism? These are only consequences, effects, not causes. I am out after the real cause, the real root of evil on earth the irrational.
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Hank, this is great. Yes. He said it simply, openly. There was no flattered pleasure in his voice, and no modesty. This, she knew, was a tribute to her, the rarest one person could pay another: the tribute of feeling free to acknowledge one's own greatness, knowing that it is understood.
Ayn Rand