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Freedom, in a political context, means freedom from government coercion. It does not mean freedom from the landlord, from the employer, or freedom from the laws of nature which do not provide men with automatic prosperity. It means freedom from the coercive power of the state ' and nothing else

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
Government
Freedom
Coercion
Nothing
Means
Employers
Mean
Else
Context
Men
Political
Provide
Nature
Prosperity
Coercive
Power
Laws
Landlord
Doe
Law
Employer
States
State
Automatic

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In a free society, one does not have to deal with those who are irrational. One is free to avoid them.
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Action without thought is mindlessness, and thought without action is hypocritical.
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Whenever anyone accuses some person of being 'unfeeling,' he means that that person is just. He means that that person has no causeless emotions and will not grant him a feeling which he does not deserve. He means that 'to feel' is to go against reason, against moral values, against reality.
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A 'whim' is a desire experienced by a person who does not know and does not care to discover its cause.
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There are no evil thoughts except one the refusal to think.
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Live a life as a monument to your soul.
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I am interested in politics only in order to secure and protect freedom.
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An emotion is an automatic response, an automatic effect of man's value premises. An effect, not a cause. There is no necessary clash, no dichotomy between man's reason and his emotions
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The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.
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Men have died in torture chambers, on the stake, in concentration camps, in front of firing squads, rather than renounce their convictions. The appeaser renounces his under the pressure of a frown on a vacant face.
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To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That's what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul - would you understand why that's much harder?
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Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection, and the base of a moral existence.
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Volumes can be and have been written about the issue of freedom versus dictatorship, but, in essence, it comes down to a single question: do you consider it moral to treat men as sacrificial animals and to rule them by physical force?
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Man has a single basic choice: to think or not, and that is the gauge of his virtue. Moral perfection is an unbreached rationality-not the degree of your intelligence, but the full and relentless use of your mind, not the extent of your knowledge, but the acceptance of reason as an absolute.
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Without property rights, no other rights are possible.
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Ever since Kant divorced reason from reality, his intellectual descendants have been diligently widening the breach.
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Self-esteem is reliance on one's power to think... The man of authentic self-confidence is the man who relies on the judgment of his own mind.
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The social system based on and consonant with the altruist morality-with the code of self-sacrifice- is socialism, in all or any of its variants: fascism, Nazism, communism. All of them treat man as a sacrificial animal to be immolated for the benefit of the group, the tribe, the society, the state.
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Those who say theory and practice are two unrelated realms are fools in one and scoundrels in the other.
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One loses everything when one loses one's sense of humor.
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