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Truth is the recognition of reality reason, man's only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.

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
Reason
Novelists
Mean
Standard
Men
Recognition
Standards
Knowledge
Means
Reality
Truth

More quotes by Ayn Rand

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If it were true that men could achieve their good by means of turning some men into sacrificial animals, and ... if I were asked to serve the interests of society apart from, above and against my own I would refuse... I would fight in the full confidence of the justice of my battle and of a living being's right to exist.
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America's founding Ideal was the principle of individual rights. Nothing more - and nothing less.
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What do I think of President Reagan? The best answer to give would be: I don't think of him. And the more I see, the less I think.
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Love should be treated like a business deal, but every business deal has its own terms and its own currency. And in love, the currency is virtue. You love people not for what you do for them or what they do for you. You love them for the values, the virtues, which they have achieved in their own character.
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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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Today we have discovered the word that could not be said. I
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The more neurotic and evasive a person is, the shorter the range of his interests.
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There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.
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Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgement and nothing can help you escape it - that no substitute can do your thinking, as no pinch-hitter can live your life.
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Productive work is the central purpose of a rational man's life, the central value that integrates and determines the hierarchy of all his other values. Reason is the source, the precondition of his productive work, pride is the result.
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For they have nothing to fight me with, save the brute force of their numbers. I have my mind.
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I got the idea [for Anthem's theme] in my school days, in Soviet Russia, when I heard all the vicious attacks on individualism, and asked myself what the world would be like if men lost the word 'I.'
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A rational man knows-or makes it a point to discover-the source of his emotions, the basic premises from which they come.
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you are never called upon to prove a negative. that's a law of logic.
Ayn Rand
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Government holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force.
Ayn Rand
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I want to be prepared to claim the greatest virtue of all - that I was a man who made money
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In this world, either you're virtuous or you enjoy yourself. Not both, lady, not both.
Ayn Rand
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Any refusal to recognize reality, for any reason whatever, has disastrous consequences. There are no evil thoughts except one: the refusal to think. Don't ignore your own desires.... Don't sacrifice them. Examine their cause. There is a limit to how much you should have to bear.
Ayn Rand
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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.
Ayn Rand
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You don't know how hard I've tried to be left standing all by myself.
Ayn Rand