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Indiscriminate tolerance and indiscriminate condemnation are not two opposites: they are two variants of the same evasion.

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
Evasion
Condemnation
Tolerance
Opposites
Two
Variants
Indiscriminate

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No one's happiness but my own is in my power to achieve or to destroy.
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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 . . .
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The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world
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You seek escape from pain. We seek the achievement of happiness. You exist for the sake of avoiding punishment. We exist for the sake of earning rewards. Threats will not make us function fear is not our incentive. It is not death that we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to live
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The word which can never die on this earth, for it is the heart of it and the meaning and the glory. The sacred word: EGO.
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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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To abstain from condemning a torturer, is to become an accessory to the torture and murder of his victims.
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Do not keep silent when your own ideas and values are being attacked. If a dictatorship ever comes to this country, it will be by the fault of those who keep silent. We are still free enough to speak. Do we have time? No one can tell.
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Do not ever say that the desire to 'do good' by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.
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That which is not worth contemplating in life, is not worth recreating in art.
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Let us destroy, but don't let us pretend that we are commiting an act of virtue.
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You have been called selfish for the courage of acting on your own judgement and bearing sole responsibility for your own life. You have been called arrogant for your independent mind. You have been called cruel for your unyielding integrity. You have been calle anti social for the vision that made you venture upon undiscovered roads.
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Civilization does not have to perish. The brutes are winning only by default.
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Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it's yours.
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The ' pleasure' of being drunk is obviously the pleasure of escaping from the responsibility of Consciousness.
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In a capitalist society, all human relationships are voluntary. Men are free to cooperate or not, to deal with one another or not, as their own individual judgments, convictions and interests dictate.
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Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.
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This is the age othe common man, they tell us-a title which any man may claim to the extent osuch distinction as he has managed not to achieve.
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In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.
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