Quote

Love is an expression and assertion of self-esteem, a response to one's own values in the person of another. One gains a profoundly personal, selfish joy from the mere existence of the person one loves. It is one's own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns, and derives from love.

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
Happiness
Gains
Values
Loves
Earns
Another
Response
Derives
Mere
Assertion
Persons
Expression
Profoundly
Person
Personal
Seeks
Self
Joy
Esteem
Love
Existence
Selfish

More quotes by Ayn Rand

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In order to be in control of your life, you have to have a purpose-a productive purpose.
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Productive work is the central purpose of a rational man's life, the central value that integrates and determines the hierarchy of all his other values. Reason is the source, the precondition of his productive work, pride is the result.
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In this world, either you're virtuous or you enjoy yourself. Not both, lady, not both.
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Political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom a free mind and a free market are corollaries.
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Namely, if I am challenging the base of all these institutions, I'm challenging the moral code of altruism. The precept that man's moral duty is to live for others. That man must sacrifice himself to others. Which is the present day morality.
Ayn Rand
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Learn to value yourself, which means: fight for your happiness.
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The charming aspect of Christmas is the fact that it expresses good will in a cheerful, happy, benevolent, non-sacrificial way.
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My greatest personal mistake is ever to allow a word or moment that “doesn’t count,” i.e., that I do not refer to my own basic principles. Every word, every action, every moment counts. (This is the pattern on which everybody makes mistakes [or] becomes irrational — not relating their one action or one conviction to another.
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I could die for you. But I couldn't, and wouldn't, live for you.
Ayn Rand
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Art is the indispensable medium for the communication of a moral ideal.
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The quickest way to kill the human spirit is to ask someone to do mediocre work.
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Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably the man who respects it has earned it.
Ayn Rand
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To abstain from condemning a torturer, is to become an accessory to the torture and murder of his victims.
Ayn Rand
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Even if smog were a risk to human life, we must remember that life in nature, without technology, is wholesale death.
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There is nothing to take a man’s freedom away from him, save other men.
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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.
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Thinking men cannot be ruled ambitious men do not stagnate.
Ayn Rand
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All the evils, abuses, and iniquities, popularly ascribed to businessmen and to capitalism, were not caused by an unregulated economy or by a free market, but by government intervention into the economy.
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When a man declares: There are no blacks and whites [in morality] he is making a psychological confession, and what he means is: I am unwilling to be wholly good - and please don't regard me as wholly evil!
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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