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If you tell an amateur that his story is not good, he always declares indignantly: 'Oh, but it really happened just like this!' The writer who doesn't understand that this is beside the point is not a writer at all.

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
Like
Point
Understand
Indignantly
Tell
Declares
Doesn
Amateur
Stories
Beside
Really
Writer
Good
Happened
Always
Story

More quotes by Ayn Rand

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There has never been a philosophy, a theory or a doctrine, that attacked (or 'limited') reason, which did not preach submission to the power of some authority.
Ayn Rand
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Selfishness does not mean only to do things for one's self. One may do things, affecting others, for his own pleasure and benefit. This is not immoral, but the highest of morality.
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I don't wish to be the symbol of anything. I'm only myself.
Ayn Rand
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I hold that such a question can never arise except in a society of cannibals.
Ayn Rand
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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.
Ayn Rand
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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.
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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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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In a capitalist society, all human relationships are voluntary.
Ayn Rand
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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.
Ayn Rand
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I am only concerned with politics so I may see the day when I don't have to be concerned with politics.
Ayn Rand
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If you don't know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn.
Ayn Rand
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The creed of sacrifice is a morality for the immoral.
Ayn Rand
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Morality pertains only to the sphere of man's free will - only to those actions which are open to his choice.
Ayn Rand
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Within the extent of your knowledge, you are right.
Ayn Rand
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There can be no compromise on moral principles.
Ayn Rand
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Self-esteem is reliance on one's power to think... The man of authentic self-confidence is the man who relies on the judgment of his own mind.
Ayn Rand
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Do not make the mistake of the ignorant who think that an individualist is a man who says: “I’ll do as I please at everybody else’s expense.” An individualist is a man who recognizes the inalienable individual rights of man—his own and those of others.
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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Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality. But existence exists reality is not to be wiped out, it will merely wipe out the wiper
Ayn Rand