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Each man must live as an end in himself and follow his own rational self-interest.

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
Men
Rational
Follow
Interest
Ends
Live
Self
Must

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If you want to save capitalism there is only one type of argument that you should adopt, the only one that has ever won in any moral issue: the argument from self-esteem. Check your premises, convince yourself of the rightness of your cause, then fight for capitalism with full, moral certainty.
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An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.
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Do you know the hallmark of the second-rater? It's resentment of another man's achievement.
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To abstain from condemning a torturer, is to become an accessory to the torture and murder of his victims.
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A culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiate d masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.
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We didn't really have to take everything so seriously, did we?
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[Altruism] is a moral system which holds that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the sole justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, value and virtue. This is the moral base of collectivism, of all dictatorships.
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Even if smog were a risk to human life, we must remember that life in nature, without technology, is wholesale death.
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Whatever road I take, the guiding star is within me the guiding star and the loadstone which point the way. They point in but one direction. They point to me.
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There's nothing of any importance in life-except how well you do your work.
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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.
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Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy.
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A 'whim' is a desire experienced by a person who does not know and does not care to discover its cause.
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The writer who develops a beautiful style, but has nothing to say, represents a kind of arrested esthetic development he is like a pianist who acquires a brilliant technique by playing finger-exercises, but never gives a concert.
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When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter if I am right, he will learn if I am wrong, I will one of us will win, but both will profit.
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When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is learning to understand and control the behavior of crop plants and domestic animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized.
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The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it.
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Thinking men cannot be ruled ambitious men do not stagnate.
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