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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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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
Author
Fundamental
Fundamentals
Present
Creative
Expresses
Values
Chooses
Writing
Metaphysical
Presents

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[Altruism] is a moral system which holds that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the sole justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, value and virtue. This is the moral base of collectivism, of all dictatorships.
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A culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiate d masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.
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Do not make the mistake of the ignorant who think that an individualist is a man who says: “I’ll do as I please at everybody else’s expense.” An individualist is a man who recognizes the inalienable individual rights of man—his own and those of others.
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Truth is the recognition of reality reason, man's only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.
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It is one's own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns, and derives from love.
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No one's happiness but my own is in my power to achieve or to destroy.
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It's such a waste to be subtle and vicious with people who don't even know that you're being subtle and vicious
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If, before undertaking some action, you must obtain the permission of society-you are not free, whether such permission is granted to you or not. Only a slave acts on permission. A permission is not a right.
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That an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error.
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The sky is like a black sieve pierced by silver drops that tremble, ready to burst through.
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Romantic art is the fuel and the spark plug of a Man's soul. It's task is to set a soul on fire and never let it go out.
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I want to be prepared to claim the greatest virtue of all - that I was a man who made money
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A rational process is a moral process.
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Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes.
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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.
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Action without thought is mindlessness, and thought without action is hypocritical.
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An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.
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Collectivism requires self-sacrifice, the subordination of one's interests to those of others.
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I made my fortune by being able to spot a certain kind of man.
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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.
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