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We [entrepreneurs] required that you leave us free to function -- free to think and work as we choose ... -- free to earn our own profits and make our own fortunes ... Such was the price we asked, which you chose to reject as too high.

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
Leave
Required
High
Entrepreneur
Fortunes
Free
Price
Entrepreneurs
Science
Profit
Profits
Work
Fortune
Reject
Make
Function
Chose
Think
Asked
Rejects
Thinking
Choose
Earn

More quotes by Ayn Rand

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Let me be the child in the story and declare that the Emperor is naked — or that America is culturally bankrupt.
Ayn Rand
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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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I've always thought that a feeling which changes never existed in the first place.
Ayn Rand
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Politically, the goal of today’s dominant trend is statism. Philosophically, the goal is the obliteration of reason psychologically, it is the erosion of ambition.
Ayn Rand
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It is futile to fight against, if one does not know what one is fighting for.
Ayn Rand
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The social system based on and consonant with the altruist morality-with the code of self-sacrifice- is socialism, in all or any of its variants: fascism, Nazism, communism. All of them treat man as a sacrificial animal to be immolated for the benefit of the group, the tribe, the society, the state.
Ayn Rand
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She stood at the window, her arms spread wide, holding on to each side of the frame, it was as if she held a piece of the city.
Ayn Rand
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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.
Ayn Rand
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Don't consider our interests or desires. You have no duty to anyone but yourself.
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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We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.
Ayn Rand
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If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose . . . the fact that they were the people who created the phrase to make money. No other language or nation had ever used these words before. . . . Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created.
Ayn Rand
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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.
Ayn Rand
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I can accept anything, except what seems to be the easiest for most people: the half-way, the almost, the just-about, the in-between.
Ayn Rand
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Is it advisable to spread out all the conveniences of culture before people to whom a few steps up a stair to a library is a sufficient deterrent from reading?
Ayn Rand
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Every period ruled by mystics was an era of stagnation and want, when most men were on strike against existence.
Ayn Rand
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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.
Ayn Rand
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Emotions are not tools of cognition. They tell you nothing about the nature of reality.
Ayn Rand
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Aristotle may be regarded as the cultural barometer of Western history. Whenever his influence dominated the scene, it paved the way for one of history's brilliant eras whenever it fell, so did mankind.
Ayn Rand
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Neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims.
Ayn Rand