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The writer who develops a beautiful style, but has nothing to say, represents a kind of arrested esthetic development he is like a pianist who acquires a brilliant technique by playing finger-exercises, but never gives a concert.

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
Like
Gives
Concerts
Acquires
Style
Acquire
Pianist
Playing
Technique
Exercises
Beautiful
Brilliant
Develops
Nothing
Fingers
Concert
Giving
Exercise
Arrested
Kind
Development
Finger
Never
Writer
Represents
Esthetic

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I cannot stand Tolstoy, and reading him was the most boring literary duty I ever had to perform, his philosophy and his sense of life are not merely mistaken, but evil, and yet, from a purely literary viewpoint, on his own terms, I have to evaluate him as a good writer.
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This god, this one word: 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?
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Thinking men cannot be ruled ambitious men do not stagnate.
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The man who produces while others dispose of his product is a slave.
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The greatest threat to mankind and civilization is the spread of the totalitarian philosophy. Its best ally is not the devotion of its followers but the confusion of its enemies. To fight it, we must understand it.
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Independence is the only gauge of human virtue and value. What a man is and makes of himself not what he has or hasn’t done for others. There is no substitute for personal dignity.
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If you know that this life is all that you have, wouldn't you make the most of it?
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Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it.
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Let me be the child in the story and declare that the Emperor is naked — or that America is culturally bankrupt.
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A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.
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Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.
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The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other - until one day when they are suddenly declared to be the country's official ideology.
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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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Man is a being with free will therefore, each man is potentially good or evil, and it's up to him and only him (through his reasoning mind) to decide which he wants to be.
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Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer - and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.
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You don't build for the way people live, but for the way they should live. I don't write about people as they are, but as they could be and should be.
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Collectivism answers: The power of society is unlimited. Society may make any laws it wishes, and force them upon anyone in any manner it wishes.
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To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one's thinking to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one's mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.
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Rationalization is a process of not perceiving reality, but of attempting to make reality fit one’s emotions.
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