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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.

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
Anyone
Ends
Satisfy
Become
Frustration
Doe
Fulfillment
Anything
Compromise
Everything
General
Trying
Lead
People
Everybody

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Genius is an exaggeration of dimension. So is elephantiasis. Both may be only a disease.
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Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.
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A 'whim' is a desire experienced by a person who does not know and does not care to discover its cause.
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There are two side to every issue.
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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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[Altruism] is a moral system which holds that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the sole justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, value and virtue. This is the moral base of collectivism, of all dictatorships.
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A culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiate d masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.
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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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I could die for you. But I couldn't, and wouldn't, live for you.
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There is nothing to take a man’s freedom away from him, save other men.
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Emotions are inherent in your nature, but their content is dictated by your mind. Your emotional capacity is an empty motor, and your values are the fuel with which your mind fills it.
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It is a policeman’s duty to retrieve stolen property and return it to its owners. But when robbery becomes the purpose of the law, and the policeman’s duty becomes, not protection, but the plunder of property - then it is an outlaw who has to become a policeman.
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Each man must live as an end in himself and follow his own rational self-interest.
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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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They talked about nothing in particular, sentences that had meaning only in the sound of the voices, in warm gaiety, in the ease of complete relaxation.
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Any refusal to recognize reality, for any reason whatever, has disastrous consequences. There are no evil thoughts except one: the refusal to think. Don't ignore your own desires.... Don't sacrifice them. Examine their cause. There is a limit to how much you should have to bear.
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Any group or collective, large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members.
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I don't wish to be the symbol of anything. I'm only myself.
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The charming aspect of Christmas is the fact that it expresses good will in a cheerful, happy, benevolent, non-sacrificial way.
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The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind
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