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The action required to sustain human life is primarily intellectual everything man needs has to be discovered by his mind and produced by his effort.

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
Men
Effort
Life
Acting
Action
Sustain
Human
Primarily
Everything
Required
Humans
Produced
Needs
Discovered
Mind
Intellectual

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The desire not to be anything is the desire not to be.
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That which exists possesses identity he could keep it out of existence by refusing to identify it.
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If you know that this life is all that you have, wouldn't you make the most of it?
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Self-esteem is reliance on ones power to think.
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The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.
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When one turns from reason to faith, when one rejects the absolutism of reality, one undercuts the absolutism of one's consciousness - and one's mind becomes an organ one cannot trust any longer. It becomes what the mystics claim it to be: a tool of distortion.
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Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artists metaphysical value judgments.
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What whip lashed them to their knees in shame and submission? The worship of the word We.
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A BUSINESSMAN cannot force you to buy his product if he makes a mistake, He suffers the consequences if he fails, he takes the loss. A bureaucrat, forces you to obey his decisions, whether you agree with him or not... If he makes a mistake, you suffer the consequences If he fails, He passes the loss on to you, in the form of heavier taxes.
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And that night we knew that to hold the body of women in our arms in neither ugly nor shameful, but the one ecstasy granted to the race of men.
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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.
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The only man never to be redeemed is the man without passion.
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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
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whose steps were a restless substitute for flight.
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Man's character is the product of his premises.
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Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think.
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Creation comes before distribution - or there will be nothing to distribute. The need of the creator comes before the need of any possible beneficiary. Yet we are taught to admire the second-hander who dispenses gifts he has not produced above the man who made the gifts possible. We praise an act of charity. We shrug at an act of achievement.
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Love is our response to our highest values. Love is self-enjoyment. The noblest love is born out of admiration of another's values.
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Do not consider Collectivists as sincere but deluded idealists. The proposal to enslave some men for the sake of others is not an ideal brutality is not idealistic, no matter what its purpose. Do not ever say that the desire to do good by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.
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Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone.
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