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

More quotes by Ayn Rand

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Selfishness does not mean only to do things for one's self. One may do things, affecting others, for his own pleasure and benefit. This is not immoral, but the highest of morality.
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.
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Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
Ayn Rand
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The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man's self-defense, and, as such, may only resort to force only against those who start the use of force.
Ayn Rand
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Style is not an end in itself, it is only a means to an end - the means of telling a story.
Ayn Rand
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She knew that she could not have reached this white serenity except as the sum of all the colors, of all the violence she had known.
Ayn Rand
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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!
Ayn Rand
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The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.
Ayn Rand
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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.
Ayn Rand
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I regret nothing. There have been things I missed, but I ask no questions, because I have loved it, such as it has been, even the moments of emptiness, even the unanswered-and that I loved it, that is the unanswered in my life.
Ayn Rand
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And here, over the portals of my fort, I shall cut in the stone the word which is to be my beacon and my banner. The word which will not die should we all perish in battle. The word which can never die on this earth, for it is the heart of it and the meaning and the glory. The sacred word: EGO
Ayn Rand
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By what he chooses to present and by how he presents it, any author expresses his fundamental, metaphysical values.
Ayn Rand
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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
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We didn't really have to take everything so seriously, did we?
Ayn Rand
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There is nothing to take a man’s freedom away from him, save other men.
Ayn Rand
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You were not born to be a second-hander. Howard Roark to Gail Wynand in The Fountainhead
Ayn Rand
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There can be no justification for choosing any part of that which one knows to be evil.
Ayn Rand
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I am only concerned with politics so I may see the day when I don't have to be concerned with politics.
Ayn Rand
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Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed.
Ayn Rand
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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.
Ayn Rand