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Productive work is the central purpose of a rational man's life, the central value that integrates and determines the hierarchy of all his other values. Reason is the source, the precondition of his productive work, pride is the result.

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
Work
Result
Precondition
Men
Pride
Integrating
Life
Value
Hierarchy
Source
Determines
Results
Central
Purpose
Productive
Values
Rational
Reason
Determine
Integrates

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The charming aspect of Christmas is the fact that it expresses good will in a cheerful, happy, benevolent, non-sacrificial way.
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A mystic is a man who treats his feelings as tools of cognition.
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Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it.
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Guilt is a rope that wears thin.
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Courage and confidence are practical necessities . . . courage is the practical form of being true to existence, of being true to truth, and confidence is the practical form of being true to one’s own consciousness.
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Many words have been granted me, and some are wise, and some are false, but only three are holy: I will it!
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That which is not worth contemplating in life, is not worth recreating in art.
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Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.
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The degree of a country's freedom is the degree of its prosperity.
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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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Don't worry. They're all against me. But I have one advantage: they don't know what they want. I do.
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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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I am unwilling to be wholly good—and please don't regard me as wholly evil!
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Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?
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It is not as late as you think. It is merely early - in the age of the rebirth of individualism.
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Ah, there's nothing like tea in the afternoon. When the British Empire collapses, historians will find that it had made but two invaluable contributions to civilization - this tea ritual and the detective novel.
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Inflation is not caused by the actions of private citizens, but by the government: by an artificial expansion of the money supply required to support deficit spending. No private embezzlers or bank robbers in history have ever plundered people's savings on a scale comparable to the plunder perpetrated by the fiscal policies of statist governments.
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To demand 'sense' is the hallmark of nonsense. Nature does not make sense. Nothing makes sense.
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