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In order to be in control of your life, you have to have a purpose-a productive purpose.

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
Productive
Control
Purpose
Order
Life

More quotes by Ayn Rand

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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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There is nothing to take a man’s freedom away from him, save other men.
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Andrei, did you like the opera? Not particularly. Andrei, do you see what you're missing? I don't think I do, Kira. It's all rather silly. And useless. Can't you enjoy things that are useless, merely because they are beautiful? No. But I enjoyed it. The music? No. The way you listened to it.
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If you tell an ugly woman that she is beautiful, you offer her the great homage of corrupting the concept of beauty.
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My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.
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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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A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.
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I made my fortune by being able to spot a certain kind of man.
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It is my eyes which see, and the sight of my eyes grants beauty to the earth.
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You don't build for the way people live, but for the way they should live. I don't write about people as they are, but as they could be and should be.
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Psychologically, the choice to think or not is the choice to focus or not. Existentially, the choice to focus or not is the choice to be conscious or not. Metaphysically, the choice to be conscious or not is the choice of life or death.
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The more you learn, the more you know that you know nothing.
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To deal with men by force is as impractical as to deal with nature by persuasion.
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We the Living is not a novel 'about Soviet Russia.' It is a novel about Man against the State. Its basic theme is the sanctity of human life - using the word 'sanctity' not in a mystical sense, but in the sense of 'supreme value.'
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There were things in my past which I have not liked. But all the things of which I was proud will remain.
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He walked, groping for a sentence that hung in his mind as an empty shape. He could neither fill it or dismiss it.
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Man is a being with free will therefore, each man is potentially good or evil, and it's up to him and only him (through his reasoning mind) to decide which he wants to be.
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The government has created a nation of paper criminals. People can be put in jail and lose civil rights and liberties through bureaucratic procedures.The only thing that is keeping you out of jail is government goodwill.
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To say 'I love you' one must first be able to say the 'I.'
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There's nothing of any importance in life — except how well you do your work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are, will come from that. It's the only measure of human value.
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