Quote

Do not open your mouth to tell me that your mind has convinced you of your right to force my mind. Force and mind are opposites. Morality ends where a gun begins.

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
Convinced
Morality
Open
Force
Gun
Tell
Mouth
Ends
Begins
Right
Opposites
Mind
Mouths

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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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Compromise does not satisfy, but dissatisfies everybody it does not lead to any general fulfillment, but to general frustration those who try to become everything to all people end up by not being anything to anyone.
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The moral is the chosen, not the forced the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.
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Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it.
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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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I want to be prepared to claim the greatest virtue of all - that I was a man who made money
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The ' pleasure' of being drunk is obviously the pleasure of escaping from the responsibility of Consciousness.
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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.
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There is only one institution that can arrogate to itself the power legally to trade by means of rubber checks: the government. And it is the only institution that can mortgage your future without your knowledge or consent: government securities (and paper money) are promissory notes on future tax receipts, i.e., on your future production.
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...if men are to be ruled, then the enemy is reason.
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Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others.
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My dear fellow, who will let you? That's not the point. The point is, who will stop me?
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She thought: at this moment, the glass stem between his fingers feels just like the one between mine. We have this much in common.
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My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.
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Face a challenge and find joy in the capacity to meet it.
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And that night we knew that to hold the body of women in our arms in neither ugly nor shameful, but the one ecstasy granted to the race of men.
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Every honest man lives for himself. Every man worth calling a man lives for himself. The one who doesn't - doesn't live at all.
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If you want to feel good, be rational.
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The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man's self-defense, and, as such, may only resort to force only against those who start the use of force.
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Don't worry. They're all against me. But I have one advantage: they don't know what they want. I do.
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