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

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Man cannot demand that others give up their lives to make him happy.
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When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter if I am right, he will learn if I am wrong, I will one of us will win, but both will profit.
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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.
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Do not let your fire go out ... Do not let the Hero in your soul perish ... Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won. It exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.
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Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.
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Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer - and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.
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Man's character is the product of his premises.
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To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one's thinking to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one's mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.
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Freedom comes from seeing the ignorance of your critics and discovering the emptiness of their virtue.
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The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.
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Live a life as a monument to your soul.
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Ah, there's nothing like tea in the afternoon. When the British Empire collapses, historians will find that it had made but two invaluable contributions to civilization - this tea ritual and the detective novel.
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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 was the greatest sensation of existence: not to trust but to know.
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The great creators-the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors-stood alone against the men of their time.
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And man will go on. Man, not men.
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Capitalism and altruism are incompatible they are philosophical opposites they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society.
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All public projects are mausoleums, not always in shapes, but always in cost.
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To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. That is freedom. That and nothing else.
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Do not consider Collectivists as sincere but deluded idealists. The proposal to enslave some men for the sake of others is not an ideal brutality is not idealistic, no matter what its purpose. Do not ever say that the desire to do good by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.
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