Quote

The basic need of the creator is independence. The reasoning mind cannot work under any form of compulsion. It cannot be curbed, sacrificed or subordinated to any consideration whatsoever. It demands total independence in function and in motive.

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
Cannot
Consideration
Curbed
Form
Demands
Subordinated
Need
Total
Fountainhead
Needs
Independence
Sacrificed
Work
Creator
Compulsion
Mind
Basic
Whatsoever
Function
Reasoning
Demand
Motive

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And man will go on. Man, not men.
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Nobody has ever given a reason why men should be their brother's keepers.
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Volumes can be and have been written about the issue of freedom versus dictatorship, but, in essence, it comes down to a single question: do you consider it moral to treat men as sacrificial animals and to rule them by physical force?
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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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I don't wish to be the symbol of anything. I'm only myself.
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There were things in my past which I have not liked. But all the things of which I was proud will remain.
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To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one's thinking to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one's mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.
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If you don't know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn.
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There can be no compromise on moral principles.
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Collectivism answers: The power of society is unlimited. Society may make any laws it wishes, and force them upon anyone in any manner it wishes.
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The moral is the chosen, not the forced the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.
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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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A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.
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The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it.
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My dear fellow, who will let you? That's not the point. The point is, who will stop me?
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I guard my treasures: my thoughts, my will, my freedom. And the greatest of these is freedom.
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Reason can be fought with reason. How are you going to fight the unreasonable? The trouble with you, my dear, and with most people, is that you don’t have sufficient respect for the senseless. The senseless is the major factor in our lives. You have no chance if it is your enemy.
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Faith and force ... are corollaries: every period of history dominated by mysticism, was a period of statism, of dictatorship, of tyranny.
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Value is that which one acts to gain and/or keep. Virtue is the act by which one aims and/or keeps it.
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