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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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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
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Protect
Policemen
Government
Violence
Resort
May
Rights
Resorts
Self
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Acting
Agents
Men
Purpose
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Force
Defense
Use
Physical
Policeman

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Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably the man who respects it has earned it.
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If you agree with some tenets of Objectivism, but disagree with others, do not call yourself an Objectivist give proper authorship credit for the parts you agree with
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Faith is the wors curse of mankind, as the exact antithesis and enemy of thought.
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The causes of illusions are not pretty to discover. They're either vicious or tragic.
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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.
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No man can use his brain to think for another.
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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. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another--their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.
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Sacrifice is the surrender of that which you value in favor of which you dont
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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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He stepped to the window and pointed to the skyscrapers of the city. He said that we had to extinguish the lights of the world, and when we would see the lights of New York go out, we would know that our job was done.
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Degrees do not matter... one does not bargain about inches of evil.
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When one turns from reason to faith, when one rejects the absolutism of reality, one undercuts the absolutism of one's consciousness - and one's mind becomes an organ one cannot trust any longer. It becomes what the mystics claim it to be: a tool of distortion.
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Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.
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What whip lashed them to their knees in shame and submission? The worship of the word We.
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When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is learning to understand and control the behavior of crop plants and domestic animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized.
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Indiscriminate tolerance and indiscriminate condemnation are not two opposites: they are two variants of the same evasion. To declare that “everybody is white” or “everybody is black” or “everybody is neither white nor black, but gray,” is not a moral judgment, but an escape from the responsibility of moral judgment.
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Reason can be fought with reason. How are you going to fight the unreasonable? The trouble with you, my dear, and with most people, is that you don’t have sufficient respect for the senseless. The senseless is the major factor in our lives. You have no chance if it is your enemy.
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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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I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline.
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Happiness is not to be achieved at the command of emotional whims.
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