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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
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More quotes by Ayn Rand

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An emotion as much tells you nothing about reality, beyond the fact that something makes you feel something.
Ayn Rand
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The essential characteristic of socialism is the denial of individual property rights.
Ayn Rand
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He despised causeless affection, just as he despised unearned wealth. They professed to love him for some unknown reason and they ignored all the things for which he could wish to be loved.
Ayn Rand
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It is not advisable to venture unsolicited opinions. You should spare yourself the embarrassing discovery of their exact value to your listener.
Ayn Rand
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Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind, and a step that travels unlimited roads.
Ayn Rand
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Faith is the commitment of one's consciousness to beliefs for which one has no sensory evidence or rational proof. A mystic is a man who treats his feelings as tools of cognition. Faith is the equation of feeling with knowledge.
Ayn Rand
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Thinking men cannot be ruled ambitious men do not stagnate.
Ayn Rand
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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. One says: “Merry Christmas”-not “Weep and Repent.” And the good will is expressed in a material, earthly form-by giving presents to one's friends, or by sending them cards in token of remembrance . . . .
Ayn Rand
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The government was set to protect man from criminals-and the constitution was written to protect man from the government. The Bill of Rights was not directed at private citizens, but against the government-as an explicit declaration that individual rights supersede any public or social power.
Ayn Rand
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What is kinder--to believe the best of people and burden them with a nobility beyond their endurance--or to see them as they are, and accept it because it makes them comfortable?
Ayn Rand
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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.
Ayn Rand
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Happiness is not something you have in your hands it's something you carry in your heart. Happiness is one thing that multiplies by division. Happiness is that peculiar sensation you acquire when you are too busy to be miserable. Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values.
Ayn Rand
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Only a man of integrity can possess the virtue of honesty, since only the faking of one’s consciousness can permit the faking of existence.
Ayn Rand
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Do not consider Collectivists as sincere but deluded idealists. The proposal to enslave some men for the sake of others is not an ideal brutality is not idealistic, no matter what its purpose. Do not ever say that the desire to do good by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.
Ayn Rand
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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.
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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Creation comes before distribution - or there will be nothing to distribute. The need of the creator comes before the need of any possible beneficiary. Yet we are taught to admire the second-hander who dispenses gifts he has not produced above the man who made the gifts possible. We praise an act of charity. We shrug at an act of achievement.
Ayn Rand
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When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is learning to understand and control the behavior of crop plants and domestic animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized.
Ayn Rand
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Do it first and feel about it afterwards.' - Dagny Taggart
Ayn Rand
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A moment or an eternity—did it matter? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist.
Ayn Rand