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One must differentiate between one's thoughts and one's emotions with full clarity and precision...No discussion, cooperation, agreement, or understanding is possible among men who substitute emotion for proof.

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
Full
Agreement
Possible
Clarity
Understanding
Discussion
Must
Emotions
Differentiate
Men
Proof
Precision
Among
Substitute
Thoughts
Substitutes
Emotion
Cooperation

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Even if smog were a risk to human life, we must remember that life in nature, without technology, is wholesale death.
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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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Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values.
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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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Any alleged 'right' of one man, which necessitates the violation of the rights of another, is not and cannot be a right.
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Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.
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The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other - until one day when they are suddenly declared to be the country's official ideology.
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Ideas, in a free society, are not a crime- and neither can they serve as the justification of a crime.
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I agree that [marriage] should be treated like a business deal. But every business deal has to have its own terms and its own kind of currency.
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Romantic art is always stylized: the better the art, the cleaner and more attractive and intelligent the stylization.
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In this world, either you're virtuous or you enjoy yourself. Not both, lady, not both.
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Every period ruled by mystics was an era of stagnation and want, when most men were on strike against existence.
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I don't build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.
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Love is not self-sacrifice, but the most profound assertion of your own needs and values. It is for your own happiness that you need the person you love, and that is the greatest compliment, the greatest tribute you can pay to that person.
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The more you learn, the more you know that you know nothing.
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