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Selfishness does not mean only to do things for one's self. One may do things, affecting others, for his own pleasure and benefit. This is not immoral, but the highest of morality.

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
Pleasure
Others
Affecting
Doe
Immoral
May
Selfishness
Self
Benefit
Mean
Morality
Things
Benefits
Highest

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Learn to value yourself, which means: fight for your happiness.
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The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word 'selfishness' is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual 'package-deal,' which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind.
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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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I want to know that I've accomplished something. I want to feel that it had some meaning. At the last summing up, I want to be sure it wasn't all-for nothing.
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When the common good of a society is regarded as something apart from and superior to the individual good of its members, it means that the good of some men takes precedence over the good of others, with those others consigned to the status of sacrificial animals.
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It's not about who's going to let me it's about who's going to stop me.
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The skyline of New York is a monument of a splendour that no pyramids or palaces will ever equal or approach.
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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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All work is an act of philosophy.
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It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money.
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I want to be prepared to claim the greatest virtue of all - that I was a man who made money
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Dominique as Gail looks at her ... there is a stage of worship which makes the worshiper himself an object of reverence.
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Statism needs war a free country does not. Statism survives by looting a free country survives by producing.
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If you tell an ugly woman that she is beautiful, you offer her the great homage of corrupting the concept of beauty.
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One can study what exists and how consciousness functions but one cannot analyze (or “prove”) existence as such, or consciousness as such. These are irreducible primaries. (An attempt to “prove” them is self-contradict ory: it is an attempt to “prove” existence by means of nonexistence, and consciousness by means of unconsciousness .)
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When I listen to a symphony I love, I don't get from it what the composer got. His 'Yes' was different from mine. He could have no concern for mine and no exact conception of it. That answer is too personal to each man. But in giving himself what he wanted, he gave me a great experience.
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Did it ever occur to you, that there is no conflict of interests among men, neither in business nor in trade nor in their most personal desires - if they omit the irrational from their view of the possible and destruction from their view of the practical?
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Do you know the hallmark of the second-rater? It's resentment of another man's achievement.
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Collectivism, as an intellectual power and a moral ideal, is dead. But freedom and individualism, and their political expression, capitalism, have not yet been discovered.
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I think. I am. I will.
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