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Poverty is not a mortgage on the labor of others-misfortu ne is not a mortgage on achievement-fai lure is not a mortgage on success-sufferi ng is not a claim check, and its relief is not the goal of existence-man is not a sacrificial animal on anyone’s altar nor for anyone’s cause-life is not one huge hospital.

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
Existence
Claims
Altars
Anyone
Achievement
Mortgage
Goal
Labor
Hospital
Success
Poverty
Hospitals
Others
Cause
Check
Men
Huge
Checks
Sacrificial
Life
Animal
Relief
Altar
Causes
Claim
Lure

More quotes by Ayn Rand

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I don't build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.
Ayn Rand
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When you are asked to love everybody indiscriminately, that is to love people without any standard, to love them regardless of whether they have any value or virtue, you are asked to love nobody.
Ayn Rand
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But there are people who'll try to hurt you through the good they see in you--knowing that it's the good, needing it and punishing you for it. Don't let it break you when you discover that.
Ayn Rand
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Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others.
Ayn Rand
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If a drought strikes them, animals perish--man builds irrigation canals if a flood strikes them, animals perish--man builds dams if a carnivorous pack attacks them, animals perish--man writes the Constitution of the United States.
Ayn Rand
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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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Unjust laws have to be fought ideologically they cannot be fought or corrected by means of mere disobedience and futile martyrdom.
Ayn Rand
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Did it ever occur to you, that there is no conflict of interests among men, neither in business nor in trade nor in their most personal desires - if they omit the irrational from their view of the possible and destruction from their view of the practical?
Ayn Rand
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Mysticism requires the notion of the unknowable, which is revealed to some and withheld from others this divides men into those who feel guilt and those who cash in on it.
Ayn Rand
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The fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.
Ayn Rand
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There is no such dichotomy as 'human rights' versus 'property rights.' No human rights can exist without property rights.
Ayn Rand
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You can ignore reality, but you can't ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.
Ayn Rand
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Man's unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself.
Ayn Rand
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There has never been a philosophy, a theory or a doctrine, that attacked (or 'limited') reason, which did not preach submission to the power of some authority.
Ayn Rand
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And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride. This god, this one word: 'I.
Ayn Rand
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Your soul has a single basic function-the act of valuing.
Ayn Rand
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I hold that such a question can never arise except in a society of cannibals.
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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Compromise does not satisfy, but dissatisfies everybody it does not lead to any general fulfillment, but to general frustration those who try to become everything to all people end up by not being anything to anyone.
Ayn Rand
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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.
Ayn Rand