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Individualism regards man-every man-as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being.

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
Right
Possesses
Every
Individualism
Men
Entity
Life
Sovereign
Rational
Independent
Inalienable
Regard
Regards
Nature
Derived

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She had learned, in the slums of her childhood, that honest people were never touchy about the matter of being trusted.
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My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists - and in a single choice: to live.
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No man can use his brain to think for another.
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Serenity comes from the ability to say “Yes” to existence. Courage comes from the ability to say “No” to the wrong choices made by others.
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The conservatives see man as a body freely roaming the earth, building sand piles or factories - with an electronic computer inside his skull, controlled from Washington. The liberals see man as a soul freewheeling to the farthest reaches of the universe - but wearing chains from nose to toes when he crosses the street to buy a loaf of bread.
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A free mind and a free market are corollaries.
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Genius is an exaggeration of dimension. So is elephantiasis. Both may be only a disease.
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Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever.
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A culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiate d masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.
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One can study what exists and how consciousness functions but one cannot analyze (or “prove”) existence as such, or consciousness as such. These are irreducible primaries. (An attempt to “prove” them is self-contradict ory: it is an attempt to “prove” existence by means of nonexistence, and consciousness by means of unconsciousness .)
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The age of the skyscraper is gone. This is the age of the housing project. Which is always a prelude to the age of the cave.
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The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren
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A story is an end in itself. It is not written to teach, sell, explain or destroy anything. It is not written even to entertain. It is written as a man is born - an organic whole, dictated only by its own laws and its own necessity - an end in itself, not a means to an end.
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Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
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There can be no justification for choosing any part of that which one knows to be evil.
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I am only concerned with politics so I may see the day when I don't have to be concerned with politics.
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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.
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There is a fundamental conviction which some people never acquire, some hold only in their youth, and a few hold to the end of their days-the conviction that ideas matter . . . . That ideas matter means that knowledge matters, that truth matters, that one's mind matters . . .
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God... a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive.
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Whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man's nature and of life's potential.
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