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You don't build for the way people live, but for the way they should live. I don't write about people as they are, but as they could be and should be.

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
Build
Write
Live
Writing
Way
People

More quotes by Ayn Rand

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A man's rights are not violated by a private individual's refusal to deal with him.
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The age of the skyscraper is gone. This is the age of the housing project. Which is always a prelude to the age of the cave.
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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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Fransisco, you're some kind of very high nobility, aren't you? He answered, Not yet. The reason my family has lasted for such a long time is that none of us has ever been permitted to think he is born a d'Anconia. We are expected to become one.
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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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Life is the reward of virtue. And happiness is the goal and reward of life.
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An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.
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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.'
Ayn Rand
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Namely, if I am challenging the base of all these institutions, I'm challenging the moral code of altruism. The precept that man's moral duty is to live for others. That man must sacrifice himself to others. Which is the present day morality.
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Whoever, to whatever purpose or extent, initiates the use of force, is a killer acting on the premise of death in a manner wider than murder: the premise of destroying man's capacity to live.
Ayn Rand
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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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Andrei, did you like the opera? Not particularly. Andrei, do you see what you're missing? I don't think I do, Kira. It's all rather silly. And useless. Can't you enjoy things that are useless, merely because they are beautiful? No. But I enjoyed it. The music? No. The way you listened to it.
Ayn Rand
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I have no faith at all. I only hold convictions.
Ayn Rand
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Words are a lens to focus one's mind.
Ayn Rand
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The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life.
Ayn Rand
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Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed.
Ayn Rand
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Man has a single basic choice: to think or not, and that is the gauge of his virtue. Moral perfection is an unbreached rationality-not the degree of your intelligence, but the full and relentless use of your mind, not the extent of your knowledge, but the acceptance of reason as an absolute.
Ayn Rand
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We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.
Ayn Rand
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Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artists metaphysical value judgments.
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The sky is like a black sieve pierced by silver drops that tremble, ready to burst through.
Ayn Rand