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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
Self
Must
Men
Rational
Follow
Interest
Ends
Live

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Thousands of years ago the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burnt at the stake he'd taught his brothers to light, but he left them a gift they had not conceived and he lifted darkness from the face of the Earth.
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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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If a dedication page were to precede the total of my work, it would read: To the glory of Man.
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She thought: at this moment, the glass stem between his fingers feels just like the one between mine. We have this much in common.
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The social system based on and consonant with the altruist morality-with the code of self-sacrifice- is socialism, in all or any of its variants: fascism, Nazism, communism. All of them treat man as a sacrificial animal to be immolated for the benefit of the group, the tribe, the society, the state.
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Freedom comes from seeing the ignorance of your critics and discovering the emptiness of their virtue.
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The mind is the attribute of man. When man is born, he comes into existence with only one weapon with him--The reasoning mind.
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It's true that there's no such thing as free will. We can't help what we are or what we do. It's not our fault. Nobody's to blame for anything. It's all in your background ... and your glands. If you're good, that's no achievement of yours - you were lucky in your glands. If you're rotten, nobody should punish you - you were unlucky, that's all.
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She knew that she could not have reached this white serenity except as the sum of all the colors, of all the violence she had known.
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It is not as late as you think. It is merely early - in the age of the rebirth of individualism.
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Your soul has a single basic function-the act of valuing.
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If a life can have a 'theme-song' - and I believe every worthwhile one has - mine is [best] expressed in one word: Individualism.
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The quickest way to kill the human spirit is to ask someone to do mediocre work.
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If the truth shall kill them, let them die.
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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. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another--their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.
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A moment or an eternity—did it matter? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist.
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Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy.
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If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man's only moral commandment is: Thou shalt think. But a 'moral commandment' is a contradiction in terms. 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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We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality
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There is no such dichotomy as 'human rights' versus 'property rights.' No human rights can exist without property rights.
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