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To know one's own desires, their meaning and their costs requires the highest human virtue: rationality.

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
Meaning
Cost
Highest
Virtue
Desire
Rationality
Human
Costs
Humans
Desires
Requires

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You seek escape from pain. We seek the achievement of happiness. You exist for the sake of avoiding punishment. We exist for the sake of earning rewards. Threats will not make us function fear is not our incentive. It is not death that we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to live
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But what man does out of despair, is not necessarily a key to his character. I have always thought that the real key is in that which he seeks for his enjoyment.
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Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer - and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.
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Mysticism requires the notion of the unknowable, which is revealed to some and withheld from others this divides men into those who feel guilt and those who cash in on it.
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I've always thought that a feeling which changes never existed in the first place.
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There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.
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If you tell an amateur that his story is not good, he always declares indignantly: 'Oh, but it really happened just like this!' The writer who doesn't understand that this is beside the point is not a writer at all.
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Do not set out to write with your eyes on the box office. It can't be done.
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My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.
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Thinking men cannot be ruled ambitious men do not stagnate.
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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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the worst wars are religious wars between sects of the same religion or civil wars between brothers of the same race.
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The age of the skyscraper is gone. This is the age of the housing project. Which is always a prelude to the age of the cave.
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The action required to sustain human life is primarily intellectual everything man needs has to be discovered by his mind and produced by his effort.
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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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