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Whoever, to whatever purpose or extent, initiates the use of force, is a killer acting on the premise of death in a manner wider than murder: the premise of destroying man's capacity 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
Force
Whoever
Initiates
Use
Extent
Premise
Manner
Initiate
Death
Murder
Wider
Live
Capacity
Premises
Men
Acting
Killer
Whatever
Killers
Purpose
Destroying

More quotes by Ayn Rand

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When a man attempts to deal with me by force, I answer him, by force.
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Capitalism has been called a system of greed—yet it is the system that raised the standard of living of its poorest citizens to heights no collectivist system has ever begun to equal, and no tribal gang can conceive of.
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Collectivism requires self-sacrifice, the subordination of one's interests to those of others.
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Capitalism and altruism are incompatible they are philosophical opposites they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society.
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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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I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.
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Even if smog were a risk to human life, we must remember that life in nature, without technology, is wholesale death.
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There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.
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Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality. But existence exists reality is not to be wiped out, it will merely wipe out the wiper
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There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.
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The right to vote is a consequence, not a primary cause, of a free social system - and its value depends on the constitutional structure implementing and strictly delimiting the voters' power unlimited majority rule is an instance of the principle of tyranny.
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If workers struggle for higher wages, this is hailed as social gains, if businessmen struggle for higher profits, this is damned as selfish greed.
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We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality
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A viler evil than to murder a man, is to sell him suicide as an act of virtue.
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No one's happiness but my own is in my power to achieve or to destroy.
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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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The fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.
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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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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.
Ayn Rand
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If one doesn't respect oneself one can have neither love nor respect for others.
Ayn Rand