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Virtue is not an end in itself. Virtue is not its own reward or sacrificial fodder for the reward of evil. Life is the reward of virtue-and happiness is the goal and the reward of life.

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
Goal
Happiness
Evil
Ends
Sacrificial
Life
Fodder
Reward
Rewards
Virtue

More quotes by Ayn Rand

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Creation comes before distribution - or there will be nothing to distribute. The need of the creator comes before the need of any possible beneficiary. Yet we are taught to admire the second-hander who dispenses gifts he has not produced above the man who made the gifts possible. We praise an act of charity. We shrug at an act of achievement.
Ayn Rand
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Live a life as a monument to your soul.
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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.
Ayn Rand
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There is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone.
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The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it.
Ayn Rand
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I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.
Ayn Rand
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There’s nothing as significant as a human face. Nor as eloquent. We can never really know another person, except by our first glance at him. Because, in that glance, we know everything. Even though we’re not always wise enough to unravel the knowledge.
Ayn Rand
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The man who produces while others dispose of his product is a slave.
Ayn Rand
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There is only one institution that can arrogate to itself the power legally to trade by means of rubber checks: the government. And it is the only institution that can mortgage your future without your knowledge or consent: government securities (and paper money) are promissory notes on future tax receipts, i.e., on your future production.
Ayn Rand
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It is futile to fight against, if one does not know what one is fighting for.
Ayn Rand
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You have been called selfish for the courage of acting on your own judgement and bearing sole responsibility for your own life. You have been called arrogant for your independent mind. You have been called cruel for your unyielding integrity. You have been calle anti social for the vision that made you venture upon undiscovered roads.
Ayn Rand
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Life is the reward of virtue. And happiness is the goal and reward of life.
Ayn Rand
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Do not open your mouth to tell me that your mind has convinced you of your right to force my mind. Force and mind are opposites. Morality ends where a gun begins.
Ayn Rand
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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.
Ayn Rand
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You love people, not for what you do for them or what they do for you. You love them for their values their virtues.
Ayn Rand
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Let me be the child in the story and declare that the Emperor is naked — or that America is culturally bankrupt.
Ayn Rand
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God... a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive.
Ayn Rand
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She watched the prairies the rivers, the towns slipping past at an untouchable distance below - and she noted that the sense of detachment one feels when looking at the earth from a plane was the same sense she felt when looking at people: only her distance from people seemed longer. - Dagny Taggart
Ayn Rand
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Your soul has a single basic function-the act of valuing.
Ayn Rand
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Degrees do not matter... one does not bargain about inches of evil.
Ayn Rand