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No one's happiness but my own is in my power to achieve or to destroy.

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
Addiction
Destroy
Achieve
Happiness
Power

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A good novel is an indivisible sum every scene, sequence and passage of a good novel has to involve, contribute to and advance all three of its major attributes: theme, plot, characterization.
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But a few understand that building is a great symbol we live in our minds, and existence is the attempt to bring that life into physical reality, to state it in gesture and form. For the man who understands this, a house he owns is a statement of his life.
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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.
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The quickest way to kill the human spirit is to ask someone to do mediocre work.
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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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The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
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Potentially, a government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.
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The difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is a matter of time.
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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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Nobody has ever given a reason why men should be their brother's keepers.
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Let us destroy, but don't let us pretend that we are commiting an act of virtue.
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Rights are not a matter of numbers - and there can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob.
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The Founding Fathers were neither passive, death-worshipin g mystics nor mindless, power-seeking looters as a political group they were a phenomenon unprecedented in history: they were thinkers who were also men of action.
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If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing.
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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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Romantic art is always stylized: the better the art, the cleaner and more attractive and intelligent the stylization.
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To say 'I love you' one must first be able to say the 'I.'
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The degree of a country's freedom is the degree of its prosperity.
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The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.
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It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money.
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