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A rational man is guided by his thinking - by a process of Reason - not by his feelings and desires.

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
Process
Feelings
Reason
Men
Thinking
Guided
Desires
Rational
Desire

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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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Love should be treated like a business deal, but every business deal has its own terms and its own currency. And in love, the currency is virtue. You love people not for what you do for them or what they do for you. You love them for the values, the virtues, which they have achieved in their own character.
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Pleasure is nought but virtue's gayer name-- I wrong her still, I rate her worth too low: Virtue the root, and pleasure is the flow'r.
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and he said her name to fill the space of five years.
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And man will go on. Man, not men.
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When you force a man to act against his own choice and judgment, it's his thinking that you want him to suspend.
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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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Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.
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I got the idea [for Anthem's theme] in my school days, in Soviet Russia, when I heard all the vicious attacks on individualism, and asked myself what the world would be like if men lost the word 'I.'
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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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Men prosper or fail, survive or perish in proportion to the degree of their rationality.
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It stands to reason that if sacrifices are being given, somebody is collecting sacrifices.
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He stepped to the window and pointed to the skyscrapers of the city. He said that we had to extinguish the lights of the world, and when we would see the lights of New York go out, we would know that our job was done.
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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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Within the extent of your knowledge, you are right.
Ayn Rand
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Is it advisable to spread out all the conveniences of culture before people to whom a few steps up a stair to a library is a sufficient deterrent from reading?
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She watched the prairies the rivers, the towns slipping past at an untouchable distance below - and she noted that the sense of detachment one feels when looking at the earth from a plane was the same sense she felt when looking at people: only her distance from people seemed longer. - Dagny Taggart
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Those who say theory and practice are two unrelated realms are fools in one and scoundrels in the other.
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As long as men are free to speak, a small, rational minority will always prevail over an irrational majority.
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The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.
Ayn Rand