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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
Choices
Axiom
Reason
Axioms
Live
Contained
Exists
Morality
Choice
Single
Existence

More quotes by Ayn Rand

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Psychologically, the choice to think or not is the choice to focus or not. Existentially, the choice to focus or not is the choice to be conscious or not. Metaphysically, the choice to be conscious or not is the choice of life or death.
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Genius is an exaggeration of dimension. So is elephantiasis. Both may be only a disease.
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The worst evil that you can do, psychologically, is to laugh at yourself. That means spitting in your own face.
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If, before undertaking some action, you must obtain the permission of society-you are not free, whether such permission is granted to you or not. Only a slave acts on permission. A permission is not a right.
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The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word 'selfishness' is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual 'package-deal,' which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind.
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It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money.
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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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Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably the man who respects it has earned it.
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John Galt is Prometheus who changed his mind. After centuries of being torn by vultures in payment for having brought to men the fire of the gods, he broke his chains—and he withdrew his fire—until the day when men withdraw their vultures.
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Man cannot demand that others give up their lives to make him happy.
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Ideas, in a free society, are not a crime- and neither can they serve as the justification of a crime.
Ayn Rand
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This is the age othe common man, they tell us-a title which any man may claim to the extent osuch distinction as he has managed not to achieve.
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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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An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.
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When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter if I am right, he will learn if I am wrong, I will one of us will win, but both will profit.
Ayn Rand
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The more you learn, the more you know that you know nothing.
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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.
Ayn Rand
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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.
Ayn Rand
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To say 'I love you' one must first be able to say the 'I.'
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What is kinder--to believe the best of people and burden them with a nobility beyond their endurance--or to see them as they are, and accept it because it makes them comfortable?
Ayn Rand