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

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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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Capitalism and altruism are incompatible they are philosophical opposites they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society.
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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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I can accept anything, except what seems to be the easiest for most people: the half-way, the almost, the just-about, the in-between.
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Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter.
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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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I take no pride in hopeless longing I wouldn't hold a stillborn aspiration. I'd want to have it, to make it, to live it.
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A mystic is a man who treats his feelings as tools of cognition.
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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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If you tell an ugly woman that she is beautiful, you offer her the great homage of corrupting the concept of beauty.
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In a capitalist society, all human relationships are voluntary.
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I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. Particularly when one can't see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need?
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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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Money is just a tool. It will take you anywhere you want, but you have to be the driver
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Sacrifice is the surrender of that which you value in favor of which you dont
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I cannot stand Tolstoy, and reading him was the most boring literary duty I ever had to perform, his philosophy and his sense of life are not merely mistaken, but evil, and yet, from a purely literary viewpoint, on his own terms, I have to evaluate him as a good writer.
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I do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and I do not live in chronic dread of disaster. It is no happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that I regard as the abnormal exception in Human Life.
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Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.
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The only thing that matters my goal my reward my beginning my end is the work itself. My work done my way. A private personal selfish egotistical motivation. That’s the only way I function. That’s all I am.
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In a capitalist society, all human relationships are voluntary. Men are free to cooperate or not, to deal with one another or not, as their own individual judgments, convictions and interests dictate.
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