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Words are a lens to focus one's mind.

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
Lens
Lenses
Focus
Words
Writing
Mind

More quotes by Ayn Rand

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The greatest threat to mankind and civilization is the spread of the totalitarian philosophy. Its best ally is not the devotion of its followers but the confusion of its enemies. To fight it, we must understand it.
Ayn Rand
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Pleasure is nought but virtue's gayer name-- I wrong her still, I rate her worth too low: Virtue the root, and pleasure is the flow'r.
Ayn Rand
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For they have nothing to fight me with, save the brute force of their numbers. I have my mind.
Ayn Rand
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What objectivity and the study of philosophy requires is not an 'open mind,' but an active mind - a mind able and eagerly willing to examine ideas, but to examine them criticially.
Ayn Rand
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Men prosper or fail, survive or perish in proportion to the degree of their rationality.
Ayn Rand
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Any alleged 'right' of one man, which necessitates the violation of the rights of another, is not and cannot be a right.
Ayn Rand
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You love only those who deserve it.
Ayn Rand
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The attack on selfishness is an attack on man's self-esteem to surrender one, is to surrender the other.
Ayn Rand
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Those who say theory and practice are two unrelated realms are fools in one and scoundrels in the other.
Ayn Rand
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The fortune my spirit is not to be blown into coins of brass and flung to the winds as alms for the poor of the spirit. I guard my treasures: my thought, my will, my freedom. And the greatest of these is freedom.
Ayn Rand
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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.
Ayn Rand
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the worst wars are religious wars between sects of the same religion or civil wars between brothers of the same race.
Ayn Rand
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Statism needs war a free country does not. Statism survives by looting a free country survives by producing.
Ayn Rand
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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.
Ayn Rand
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If a man wants love he should correct his weaknesses, or his flaws, and he may deserve it. But he cannot expect the unearned, either in love or in money either in matter or in spirit.
Ayn Rand
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She watched the prairies the rivers, the towns slipping past at an untouchable distance below - and she noted that the sense of detachment one feels when looking at the earth from a plane was the same sense she felt when looking at people: only her distance from people seemed longer. - Dagny Taggart
Ayn Rand
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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.
Ayn Rand
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Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy . . . Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values, and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions.
Ayn Rand
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But what man does out of despair, is not necessarily a key to his character. I have always thought that the real key is in that which he seeks for his enjoyment.
Ayn Rand
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A 'whim' is a desire experienced by a person who does not know and does not care to discover its cause.
Ayn Rand