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Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it.

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
Produce
Produced
Wealth
Objectives
Values
Gun
Doe
Expected
Backed
Gold
Aimed
Exist
Mortgage
Paper
Equivalent
Value
Objective

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The truly and deliberately evil men are a very small minority it is the appeaser who unleashes them on mankind.
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You don't know how hard I've tried to be left standing all by myself.
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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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Life is the reward of virtue. And happiness is the goal and reward of life.
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The more neurotic and evasive a person is, the shorter the range of his interests.
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He despised causeless affection, just as he despised unearned wealth. They professed to love him for some unknown reason and they ignored all the things for which he could wish to be loved.
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The mark of an honest man... is that he means what he says and knows what he means.
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Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy . . . Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values, and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions.
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you are never called upon to prove a negative. that's a law of logic.
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A man who seeks escape from the responsibility of supporting his life by his own thought and effort, and wishes to survive by conquering, ruling and exploiting others, is NOT an Individualist.
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Live a life as a monument to your soul.
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I am unwilling to be wholly good—and please don't regard me as wholly evil!
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Government holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force.
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The genius must have his freedom and his independence.
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Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman's tool is values the bureaucrat's tool is fear.
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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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Pleasure is nought but virtue's gayer name-- I wrong her still, I rate her worth too low: Virtue the root, and pleasure is the flow'r.
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Courage and confidence are practical necessities . . . courage is the practical form of being true to existence, of being true to truth, and confidence is the practical form of being true to one’s own consciousness.
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There's only one passion in most artists more violent than their desire for admiration: their fear of identifying the nature of such admiration as they do receive.
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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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