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My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists - and in a single choice: to live.

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
Reason
Axioms
Live
Contained
Exists
Morality
Choice
Single
Existence
Choices
Axiom

More quotes by Ayn Rand

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Just as man can't exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one's rights into reality, to think, to work and keep the results, which means: the right of property.
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Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage-the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterologic al traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry.
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When you are asked to love everybody indiscriminately, that is to love people without any standard, to love them regardless of whether they have any value or virtue, you are asked to love nobody.
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There are two side to every issue.
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Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgement and nothing can help you escape it - that no substitute can do your thinking, as no pinch-hitter can live your life.
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But a few understand that building is a great symbol we live in our minds, and existence is the attempt to bring that life into physical reality, to state it in gesture and form. For the man who understands this, a house he owns is a statement of his life.
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One can't love man without hating most of the creatures who pretend to bear his name.
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Whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man's nature and of life's potential.
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The most depraved type of human being ... (is) the man without a purpose.
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To the extent to which a man is rational, life is the premise directing his actions. To the extent to which he is irrational, the premise directing his actions is death.
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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.
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The Founding Fathers were neither passive, death-worshipin g mystics nor mindless, power-seeking looters as a political group they were a phenomenon unprecedented in history: they were thinkers who were also men of action.
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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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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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Genius is an exaggeration of dimension. So is elephantiasis. Both may be only a disease.
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If men want to oppose war, it is statism that they must oppose.
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Compromise now, because you'll have to later, anyway, only then you'll have gone through things you'll wish you hadn't.
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That something happened to you is of no importance to anyone, not even to you. The important thing about you is what you choose to make happen - your values and choices. That which happened by accident - what family you were born into, in what country, and where you went to school - is totally unimportant.
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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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Science was born as a result and consequence of philosophy it cannot survive without a philosophical base. If philosophy perishes, science will be next to go.
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