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Guilt is altruism's stock in trade, and the inducing of guilt is its only means of self-perpetuati on.

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
Guilt
Trade
Means
Self
Mean
Inducing
Altruism
Stock

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Let no man posture as an advocate of peace if he proposes or supports any social system that initiates the use of force against individual men, in any form.
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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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It's true that there's no such thing as free will. We can't help what we are or what we do. It's not our fault. Nobody's to blame for anything. It's all in your background ... and your glands. If you're good, that's no achievement of yours - you were lucky in your glands. If you're rotten, nobody should punish you - you were unlucky, that's all.
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She knew that even pain can be confessed, but to confess happiness is to stand naked, delivered to the witness.
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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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But what man does out of despair, is not necessarily a key to his character. I have always thought that the real key is in that which he seeks for his enjoyment.
Ayn Rand
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Who was it that said he needed a fulcrum? Give me an unobstructed right-of-way and I'll show them how to move the earth!
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every man is free to rise as far as he's able or willing, but the degree to which he thinks determines the degree to which he'll rise.
Ayn Rand
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The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind
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If you want to save capitalism there is only one type of argument that you should adopt, the only one that has ever won in any moral issue: the argument from self-esteem. Check your premises, convince yourself of the rightness of your cause, then fight for capitalism with full, moral certainty.
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That an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error.
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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Faith is the commitment of one's consciousness to beliefs for which one has no sensory evidence or rational proof. A mystic is a man who treats his feelings as tools of cognition. Faith is the equation of feeling with knowledge.
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 only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man's self-defense, and, as such, may only resort to force only against those who start the use of force.
Ayn Rand
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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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There is only one institution that can arrogate to itself the power legally to trade by means of rubber checks: the government. And it is the only institution that can mortgage your future without your knowledge or consent: government securities (and paper money) are promissory notes on future tax receipts, i.e., on your future production.
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The only man never to be redeemed is the man without passion.
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To deal with men by force is as impractical as to deal with nature by persuasion.
Ayn Rand
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Identify the dominant philosophy of a society and you can predict its future.
Ayn Rand