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Your soul has a single basic function-the act of valuing.

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
Valuing
Fountainhead
Basic
Function
Single
Values
Soul

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When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion...th at in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing-you may know that your society is doomed.
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Words are a lens to focus one's mind.
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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.
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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.
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Collectivism requires self-sacrifice, the subordination of one's interests to those of others.
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Man's character is the product of his premises.
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Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.
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Ever since Kant divorced reason from reality, his intellectual descendants have been diligently widening the breach.
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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.
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To say 'I love you' one must first be able to say the 'I.'
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In this world, either you're virtuous or you enjoy yourself. Not both, lady, not both.
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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.
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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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All depressions are caused by government interference and the cure is always offered to take more of the poison that caused the disaster. Depressions are not the result of a free economy.
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Is it advisable to spread out all the conveniences of culture before people to whom a few steps up a stair to a library is a sufficient deterrent from reading?
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The mark of an honest man... is that he means what he says and knows what he means.
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The attack on selfishness is an attack on man's self-esteem to surrender one, is to surrender the other.
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Namely, if I am challenging the base of all these institutions, I'm challenging the moral code of altruism. The precept that man's moral duty is to live for others. That man must sacrifice himself to others. Which is the present day morality.
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Do you know the hallmark of the second-rater? It's resentment of another man's achievement.
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When you force a man to act against his own choice and judgment, it's his thinking that you want him to suspend.
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