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When a man declares: There are no blacks and whites [in morality] he is making a psychological confession, and what he means is: I am unwilling to be wholly good - and please don't regard me as wholly evil!

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
Good
Psychological
Men
Morality
Regard
Declares
Please
Whites
Evil
Blacks
Making
Unwilling
Means
Confession
Mean
Wholly

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Honor is self-esteem made visible in action.
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I don't wish to be the symbol of anything. I'm only myself.
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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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She watched the prairies the rivers, the towns slipping past at an untouchable distance below - and she noted that the sense of detachment one feels when looking at the earth from a plane was the same sense she felt when looking at people: only her distance from people seemed longer. - Dagny Taggart
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To love is to value. Only a rationally selfish man, a man of self esteem, is capable of love - because he is the only man capable of holding firm, consistent, uncompromising, unbetrayed value. The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone
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You love people, not for what you do for them or what they do for you. You love them for their values their virtues.
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It is my eyes which see, and the sight of my eyes grants beauty to the earth.
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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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The moral is the chosen, not the forced the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.
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The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world
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All work is an act of philosophy.
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Patience is always rewarded and romance is always round the corner!
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I have no faith at all. I only hold convictions.
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Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman's tool is values the bureaucrat's tool is fear.
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The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
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A man's rights are not violated by a private individual's refusal to deal with him.
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Romantic art is always stylized: the better the art, the cleaner and more attractive and intelligent the stylization.
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Man's unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself.
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My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose.
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In order to be in control of your life, you have to have a purpose-a productive purpose.
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