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Reality confronts man with a great many musts, but all of them are conditional the formula of realistic necessity is You must, if and the if stands for man's choice

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
Stands
Choice
Choices
Confronts
Reality
Conditional
Many
Formula
Must
Formulas
Great
Realistic
Men
Necessity

More quotes by Ayn Rand

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I am an innovator. This is a term of distinction, a term of honor, rather than something to hide or apologize for. Anyone who has new or valuable ideas to offer stands outside the intellectual status quo. But the status quo is not a stream, let alone a 'mainstream'. It is a stagnant swamp. It is the innovators who carry mankind forward.
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The right to life means that a man has the right to support his life by his own work (on any economic level, as high as his ability will carry him) it does not mean that others must provide him with the necessities of life.
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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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If men want to oppose war, it is statism that they must oppose.
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Man cannot demand that others give up their lives to make him happy.
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There’s nothing as significant as a human face. Nor as eloquent. We can never really know another person, except by our first glance at him. Because, in that glance, we know everything. Even though we’re not always wise enough to unravel the knowledge.
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Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked: 'Account Overdrawn.'
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Compromise does not satisfy, but dissatisfies everybody it does not lead to any general fulfillment, but to general frustration those who try to become everything to all people end up by not being anything to anyone.
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Life is the reward of virtue. And happiness is the goal and reward of life.
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Compromise now, because you'll have to later, anyway, only then you'll have gone through things you'll wish you hadn't.
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Man has a single basic choice: to think or not, and that is the gauge of his virtue. Moral perfection is an unbreached rationality-not the degree of your intelligence, but the full and relentless use of your mind, not the extent of your knowledge, but the acceptance of reason as an absolute.
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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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A mystic is a man who treats his feelings as tools of cognition.
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Any work is creative work if done by a thinking mind.
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This was the great clarity of being beyond emotion, after the reward of having felt everything one could feel.
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And man will go on. Man, not men.
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One loses everything when one loses one's sense of humor.
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We are one...alone...and only...and we love you who are one...alone...and only. We looked into each other's eyes and we knew the breath of a miracle had touched us, and fled, and left us groping vainly. And we felt torn, torn for some word we could not find.
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There can be no compromise on moral principles.
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The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.
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