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A 'whim' is a desire experienced by a person who does not know and does not care to discover its cause.

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
Desire
Doe
Care
Whimsy
Persons
Whim
Person
Experienced
Discover
Cause
Causes

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Freedom of association includes the freedom not to associate.
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The worst evil that you can do, psychologically, is to laugh at yourself. That means spitting in your own face.
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Neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims.
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Why do they always teach us that it's easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It's the hardest thing in the world--to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want.
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A viler evil than to murder a man, is to sell him suicide as an act of virtue.
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That something happened to you is of no importance to anyone, not even to you. The important thing about you is what you choose to make happen - your values and choices. That which happened by accident - what family you were born into, in what country, and where you went to school - is totally unimportant.
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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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Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer - and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.
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To say ‘I love you’ one must first know how to say the ‘I.’ The meaning of the ‘I’ is an independent, self-sufficient entity that does not exist for the sake of any other person. A person who exists only for the sake of his loved one is not an independent entity, but a spiritual parasite. The love of a parasite is worth nothing.
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Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.
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It is a sin to write this.
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A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.
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But a few understand that building is a great symbol we live in our minds, and existence is the attempt to bring that life into physical reality, to state it in gesture and form. For the man who understands this, a house he owns is a statement of his life.
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Your soul has a single basic function-the act of valuing.
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Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason.
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Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artists metaphysical value judgments.
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The only man never to be redeemed is the man without passion.
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One can't love man without hating most of the creatures who pretend to bear his name.
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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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