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Self-esteem is reliance on ones power to think.

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
Think
Thinking
Reliance
Esteem
Ones
Power
Self

More quotes by 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.
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Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?
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When one turns from reason to faith, when one rejects the absolutism of reality, one undercuts the absolutism of one's consciousness - and one's mind becomes an organ one cannot trust any longer. It becomes what the mystics claim it to be: a tool of distortion.
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Namely, if I am challenging the base of all these institutions, I'm challenging the moral code of altruism. The precept that man's moral duty is to live for others. That man must sacrifice himself to others. Which is the present day morality.
Ayn Rand
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Whatever road I take, the guiding star is within me the guiding star and the loadstone which point the way. They point in but one direction. They point to me.
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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.
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She knew that she could not have reached this white serenity except as the sum of all the colors, of all the violence she had known.
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No man can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation , an unrewarded duty or an involuntary servitude on another man. There can be no such thing as the right to enslave .
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Remember that rights are moral principles which define and protect a man's freedom of action, but impose no obligations on other men.
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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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He walked, groping for a sentence that hung in his mind as an empty shape. He could neither fill it or dismiss it.
Ayn Rand
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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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Sacrifice is the surrender of that which you value in favor of which you dont
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What is morality, she asked. Judgement to distinguish right and wrong, vision to see the truth, and courage to act upon it, dedication to that which is good, integrity to stand by the good at any price.
Ayn Rand
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For they have nothing to fight me with, save the brute force of their numbers. I have my mind.
Ayn Rand
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The more you learn, the more you know that you know nothing.
Ayn Rand
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Great men can't be ruled.
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You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.
Ayn Rand
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You seek escape from pain. We seek the achievement of happiness. You exist for the sake of avoiding punishment. We exist for the sake of earning rewards. Threats will not make us function fear is not our incentive. It is not death that we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to live
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Ever since Kant divorced reason from reality, his intellectual descendants have been diligently widening the breach.
Ayn Rand