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The Founding Fathers were neither passive, death-worshipin g mystics nor mindless, power-seeking looters as a political group they were a phenomenon unprecedented in history: they were thinkers who were also men of action.

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
Father
Passive
Death
Fathers
Looters
Action
Phenomenon
Mystics
Political
Seeking
Mindless
Also
Group
Thinkers
Power
Neither
Unprecedented
Men
Groups
Founding
History
Thinker

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Every period ruled by mystics was an era of stagnation and want, when most men were on strike against existence.
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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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Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy.
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America's founding Ideal was the principle of individual rights. Nothing more - and nothing less.
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If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man's only moral commandment is: Thou shalt think. But a 'moral commandment' is a contradiction in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.
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She knew that she could not have reached this white serenity except as the sum of all the colors, of all the violence she had known.
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Value is that which one acts to gain and/or keep. Virtue is the act by which one aims and/or keeps it.
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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
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Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.
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Love should be treated like a business deal, but every business deal has its own terms and its own currency. And in love, the currency is virtue. You love people not for what you do for them or what they do for you. You love them for the values, the virtues, which they have achieved in their own character.
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Living in a society, instead of on a desert island, does not relieve a man of the responsibility of supporting his own life.
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I made my fortune by being able to spot a certain kind of man.
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If parasitism, favoritism, corruption, and greed for the unearned did not exist, a mixed economy would bring them into existence.
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The only man never to be redeemed is the man without passion.
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If one doesn't respect oneself one can have neither love nor respect for others.
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The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
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I want it real. I want to know that there is someone, somewhere, who wants it, too. Or else what is the use of seeing it, and working, and burning oneself for an impossible vision? A spirit, too, needs fuel. It can run dry
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Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection, and the base of a moral existence.
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