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Man cannot demand that others give up their lives to make him happy.

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
Others
Cannot
Give
Giving
Make
Men
Demand
Happy
Lives

More quotes by Ayn Rand

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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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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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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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To know one's own desires, their meaning and their costs requires the highest human virtue: rationality.
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What is morality, she asked. Judgement to distinguish right and wrong, vision to see the truth, and courage to act upon it, dedication to that which is good, integrity to stand by the good at any price.
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The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.
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Thinking men cannot be ruled ambitious men do not stagnate.
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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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Happiness is not something you have in your hands it's something you carry in your heart. Happiness is one thing that multiplies by division. Happiness is that peculiar sensation you acquire when you are too busy to be miserable. Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values.
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They talked about nothing in particular, sentences that had meaning only in the sound of the voices, in warm gaiety, in the ease of complete relaxation.
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There can be no justification for choosing any part of that which one knows to be evil.
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To say 'I love you' one must first be able to say the 'I.'
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Genius is an exaggeration of dimension. So is elephantiasis. Both may be only a disease.
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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.
Ayn Rand
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He stepped to the window and pointed to the skyscrapers of the city. He said that we had to extinguish the lights of the world, and when we would see the lights of New York go out, we would know that our job was done.
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The skyline of New York is a monument of a splendour that no pyramids or palaces will ever equal or approach.
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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.
Ayn Rand
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Only a man of integrity can possess the virtue of honesty, since only the faking of one’s consciousness can permit the faking of existence.
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The Founding Fathers were neither passive, death-worshipin g mystics nor mindless, power-seeking looters as a political group they were a phenomenon unprecedented in history: they were thinkers who were also men of action.
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The only thing that matters my goal my reward my beginning my end is the work itself. My work done my way. A private personal selfish egotistical motivation. That’s the only way I function. That’s all I am.
Ayn Rand