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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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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
Issues
Compromise
Moral
Rational
Knowledge
Conviction
Truth
Basic
Matter
Integrity
Matters
Honor
Principles
Objectivism

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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.
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Freedom comes from seeing the ignorance of your critics and discovering the emptiness of their virtue.
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There’s nothing as significant as a human face. Nor as eloquent. We can never really know another person, except by our first glance at him. Because, in that glance, we know everything. Even though we’re not always wise enough to unravel the knowledge.
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Nobody has ever given a reason why men should be their brother's keepers.
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The fortune my spirit is not to be blown into coins of brass and flung to the winds as alms for the poor of the spirit. I guard my treasures: my thought, my will, my freedom. And the greatest of these is freedom.
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The mark of an honest man... is that he means what he says and knows what he means.
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The Founding Fathers were neither passive, death-worshipin g mystics nor mindless, power-seeking looters as a political group they were a phenomenon unprecedented in history: they were thinkers who were also men of action.
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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
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Ideas, in a free society, are not a crime- and neither can they serve as the justification of a crime.
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Learn to value yourself, which means: fight for your happiness.
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You'd let the whole world perish rather than soil that immaculate self of yours with a single spot of which you'd have to be ashamed.
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In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that man’s proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads.
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Man is a being with free will therefore, each man is potentially good or evil, and it's up to him and only him (through his reasoning mind) to decide which he wants to be.
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A reader has to be concerned only with the end result unless he chooses to analyze it, he does not have to know by what means that result was achieved-but it is my job to know.
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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.
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Faith is the wors curse of mankind, as the exact antithesis and enemy of thought.
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The creed of sacrifice is a morality for the immoral.
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Indiscriminate tolerance and indiscriminate condemnation are not two opposites: they are two variants of the same evasion.
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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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