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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.

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
Think
Full
Acceptance
Gauge
Thinking
Choices
Basic
Gauges
Moral
Degrees
Rationality
Knowledge
Perfection
Relentless
Use
Intelligence
Extent
Reason
Choice
Absolutes
Mind
Single
Absolute
Men
Virtue
Degree

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Sacrifice is the surrender of that which you value in favor of which you dont
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The degree of a country's freedom is the degree of its prosperity.
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To abstain from condemning a torturer, is to become an accessory to the torture and murder of his victims.
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Reason can be fought with reason. How are you going to fight the unreasonable? The trouble with you, my dear, and with most people, is that you don’t have sufficient respect for the senseless. The senseless is the major factor in our lives. You have no chance if it is your enemy.
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Neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims.
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Action without thought is mindlessness, and thought without action is hypocritical.
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The problem is not those who dream, but those who can only dream.
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Men prosper or fail, survive or perish in proportion to the degree of their rationality.
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Did it ever occur to you, that there is no conflict of interests among men, neither in business nor in trade nor in their most personal desires - if they omit the irrational from their view of the possible and destruction from their view of the practical?
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I've always thought that a feeling which changes never existed in the first place.
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We [entrepreneurs] required that you leave us free to function -- free to think and work as we choose ... -- free to earn our own profits and make our own fortunes ... Such was the price we asked, which you chose to reject as too high.
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Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life.
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No speech is ever considered, but only the speaker. It's so much easier to pass judgement on a man than on an idea.
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As long as men are free to speak, a small, rational minority will always prevail over an irrational majority.
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Money is just a tool. It will take you anywhere you want, but you have to be the driver
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I can accept anything, except what seems to be the easiest for most people: the half-way, the almost, the just-about, the in-between.
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By what he chooses to present and by how he presents it, any author expresses his fundamental, metaphysical values.
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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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My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.
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A rational man is guided by his thinking - by a process of Reason - not by his feelings and desires.
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