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

More quotes by Ayn Rand

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Let us destroy, but don't let us pretend that we are commiting an act of virtue.
Ayn Rand
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If [people] place such things as friendship and family ties above their own productive work, yes, then they are immoral. Friendship, family life and human relationships are not primary in a man's life. A man who places others first, above his own creative work, is an emotional parasite.
Ayn Rand
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The creator's concern is the conquest of nature. The parasite's concern is the conquest of men.
Ayn Rand
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The conservatives see man as a body freely roaming the earth, building sand piles or factories - with an electronic computer inside his skull, controlled from Washington. The liberals see man as a soul freewheeling to the farthest reaches of the universe - but wearing chains from nose to toes when he crosses the street to buy a loaf of bread.
Ayn Rand
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The only proper, moral purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence - to protect his right to his own life, to his own liberty, to his own property and to the pursuit of his own happiness. Without property rights, no other rights are possible.
Ayn Rand
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And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride. This god, this one word: 'I.
Ayn Rand
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Statism needs war a free country does not. Statism survives by looting a free country survives by producing.
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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Government holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force.
Ayn Rand
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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.
Ayn Rand
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Never ask people about your work.
Ayn Rand
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Face a challenge and find joy in the capacity to meet it.
Ayn Rand
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A reader has to be concerned only with the end result unless he chooses to analyze it, he does not have to know by what means that result was achieved-but it is my job to know.
Ayn Rand
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An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.
Ayn Rand
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If men want to oppose war, it is statism that they must oppose.
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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An emotion is an automatic response, an automatic effect of man's value premises. An effect, not a cause. There is no necessary clash, no dichotomy between man's reason and his emotions
Ayn Rand
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Do it first and feel about it afterwards.' - Dagny Taggart
Ayn Rand
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I am unwilling to be wholly good—and please don't regard me as wholly evil!
Ayn Rand
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To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. That is freedom. That and nothing else.
Ayn Rand