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If you tell an ugly woman that she is beautiful, you offer her the great homage of corrupting the concept of beauty.

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
Offers
Beauty
Corrupting
Woman
Homage
Tell
Ass
Beautiful
Concept
Great
Offer
Ugly
Concepts

More quotes by Ayn Rand

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Place nothing above the verdict of your own mind.
Ayn Rand
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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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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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Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed.
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There has never been a philosophy, a theory or a doctrine, that attacked (or 'limited') reason, which did not preach submission to the power of some authority.
Ayn Rand
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Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman's tool is values the bureaucrat's tool is fear.
Ayn Rand
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When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is learning to understand and control the behavior of crop plants and domestic animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized.
Ayn Rand
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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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A man's rights are not violated by a private individual's refusal to deal with him.
Ayn Rand
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The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind
Ayn Rand
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The mark of an honest man... is that he means what he says and knows what he means.
Ayn Rand
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To demand 'sense' is the hallmark of nonsense. Nature does not make sense. Nothing makes sense.
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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Whenever anyone accuses some person of being 'unfeeling,' he means that that person is just. He means that that person has no causeless emotions and will not grant him a feeling which he does not deserve. He means that 'to feel' is to go against reason, against moral values, against reality.
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Allies never trust each other, but that doesn't spoil their effectiveness.
Ayn Rand
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The end does not justify the means. No one's rights can be secured by the violation of the rights of others.
Ayn Rand
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The great creators-the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors-stood alone against the men of their time.
Ayn Rand
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If you don't know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn.
Ayn Rand
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Guilt is altruism's stock in trade, and the inducing of guilt is its only means of self-perpetuati on.
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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.
Ayn Rand