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We the Living is not a novel 'about Soviet Russia.' It is a novel about Man against the State. Its basic theme is the sanctity of human life - using the word 'sanctity' not in a mystical sense, but in the sense of 'supreme value.'

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
Humans
Novel
Mystical
Men
Word
Soviet
Life
State
Theme
Values
Basic
Living
Russia
Sense
Supreme
States
Using
Human
Value
Sanctity

More quotes by Ayn Rand

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Each man must live as an end in himself and follow his own rational self-interest.
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Freedom, in a political context, means freedom from government coercion. It does not mean freedom from the landlord, from the employer, or freedom from the laws of nature which do not provide men with automatic prosperity. It means freedom from the coercive power of the state ' and nothing else
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A mystic is a man who treats his feelings as tools of cognition.
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The more propaganda . . . conservatives spread for capitalist economics while at the same time preaching collectivism morally and philosophically , the more nails they’ll drive into capitalism’s coffin.
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Learn to value yourself, which means: fight for your happiness.
Ayn Rand
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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.
Ayn Rand
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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.
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Fransisco, you're some kind of very high nobility, aren't you? He answered, Not yet. The reason my family has lasted for such a long time is that none of us has ever been permitted to think he is born a d'Anconia. We are expected to become one.
Ayn Rand
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Don't think of them now. Never think of pain or danger or enemies a moment longer than is necessary to fight them. You're here. It's our time and our life, not theirs. Don't struggle not to be happy. You are. - John Gault
Ayn Rand
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Civilization does not have to perish. The brutes are winning only by default.
Ayn Rand
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No man can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation , an unrewarded duty or an involuntary servitude on another man. There can be no such thing as the right to enslave .
Ayn Rand
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There can be no compromise on basic principles. There can be no compromise on moral issues. There can be no compromise on matters of knowledge, of truth, of rational conviction.
Ayn Rand
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Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy . . . Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values, and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions.
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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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 . . .
Ayn Rand
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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.
Ayn Rand
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I love you so much that nothing can matter to me - not even you...Only my love- not your answer. Not even your indifference
Ayn Rand
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All public projects are mausoleums, not always in shapes, but always in cost.
Ayn Rand
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Never ask people about your work.
Ayn Rand
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There's nothing of any importance in life — except how well you do your work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are, will come from that. It's the only measure of human value.
Ayn Rand