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

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When I listen to a symphony I love, I don't get from it what the composer got. His 'Yes' was different from mine. He could have no concern for mine and no exact conception of it. That answer is too personal to each man. But in giving himself what he wanted, he gave me a great experience.
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Political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom a free mind and a free market are corollaries.
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The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
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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.
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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 only man never to be redeemed is the man without passion.
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Indiscriminate tolerance and indiscriminate condemnation are not two opposites: they are two variants of the same evasion.
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Ordinary human concern for human distress does not manifest itself ordinarily in the form of a gun aimed at the wallets and earnings of one's neighbors.
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Man's character is the product of his premises.
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There is only one institution that can arrogate to itself the power legally to trade by means of rubber checks: the government. And it is the only institution that can mortgage your future without your knowledge or consent: government securities (and paper money) are promissory notes on future tax receipts, i.e., on your future production.
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I can say-not as a patriotic bromide, but with full knowledge of the necessary metaphysical, epistemological , ethical, political and esthetic roots-that the United States of America is the greatest, the noblest and, in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world.
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but their eyes were as cold blue glass buttons.
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Style is not an end in itself, it is only a means to an end - the means of telling a story.
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A viler evil than to murder a man, is to sell him suicide as an act of virtue.
Ayn Rand
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A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.
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A culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiate d masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.
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Love, friendship, respect, admiration are the emotional response of one man to the virtues of another, the spiritual payment given in exchange for the personal, selfish pleasure which one man derives from the virtues of another man’s character.
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They talked about nothing in particular, sentences that had meaning only in the sound of the voices, in warm gaiety, in the ease of complete relaxation.
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I feel that others live up to me, if they want me.
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Contrary to the ecologists, nature does not stand still and does not maintain the kind of equilibrium that guarantees the survival of any particular species - least of all the survival of her greatest and most fragile product: man.
Ayn Rand