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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
Happiness
Evil
Ends
Sacrificial
Life
Fodder
Reward
Rewards
Virtue
Goal

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What greater wealth is there than to own your life and to spend it on growing? Every living thing must grow. It can't stand still. It must grow or perish.
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Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.
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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 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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She fell asleep, lying there, her hand clasping his. Her last awareness, before she surrendered the responsibility of consciousness, was the sense of an enormous void, the void of a city and of a continent, where she would never be able to find the man whom she had no right to seek.
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What is kinder--to believe the best of people and burden them with a nobility beyond their endurance--or to see them as they are, and accept it because it makes them comfortable?
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Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed.
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Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.
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I do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and I do not live in chronic dread of disaster. It is no happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that I regard as the abnormal exception in Human Life.
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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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I am interested in politics only in order to secure and protect freedom.
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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 that my personal crusade in life (in the philosophical sense) is not merely to fight collectivism, nor to fight altruism? These are only consequences, effects, not causes. I am out after the real cause, the real root of evil on earth the irrational.
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The greatest threat to mankind and civilization is the spread of the totalitarian philosophy. Its best ally is not the devotion of its followers but the confusion of its enemies. To fight it, we must understand it.
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You know, I think that only if one feels immensely important can one feel truly light.
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The difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is a matter of time.
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I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
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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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Potentially, a government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.
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To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one's thinking to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one's mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.
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