Quote

What is kinder--to believe the best of people and burden them with a nobility beyond their endurance--or to see them as they are, and accept it because it makes them comfortable?

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
Best
Nobility
Believe
Endurance
People
Burden
Accept
Comfortable
Beyond
Accepting
Makes
Kinder

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Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth, the man who would make his fortune no matter where he started.
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I want to know that I've accomplished something. I want to feel that it had some meaning. At the last summing up, I want to be sure it wasn't all-for nothing.
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Do not open your mouth to tell me that your mind has convinced you of your right to force my mind. Force and mind are opposites. Morality ends where a gun begins.
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Any group or collective, large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members.
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Volumes can be and have been written about the issue of freedom versus dictatorship, but, in essence, it comes down to a single question: do you consider it moral to treat men as sacrificial animals and to rule them by physical force?
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Dominique as Gail looks at her ... there is a stage of worship which makes the worshiper himself an object of reverence.
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Humor is not an unconditional virtue its moral character depends on its object. To laugh at the contemptible, is a virtue to laugh at the good, is a hideous vice. Too often, humor is used as the camouflage of moral cowardice.
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There can be no justification for choosing any part of that which one knows to be evil.
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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.
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Reality confronts man with a great many musts, but all of them are conditional the formula of realistic necessity is You must, if and the if stands for man's choice
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Reason can be fought with reason. How are you going to fight the unreasonable? The trouble with you, my dear, and with most people, is that you don’t have sufficient respect for the senseless. The senseless is the major factor in our lives. You have no chance if it is your enemy.
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There are no evil thoughts except one the refusal to think.
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A rational process is a moral process.
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Man is a being with free will therefore, each man is potentially good or evil, and it's up to him and only him (through his reasoning mind) to decide which he wants to be.
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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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I've always thought that a feeling which changes never existed in the first place.
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Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever.
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It is one's own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns, and derives from love.
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There is only one institution that can arrogate to itself the power legally to trade by means of rubber checks: the government. And it is the only institution that can mortgage your future without your knowledge or consent: government securities (and paper money) are promissory notes on future tax receipts, i.e., on your future production.
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