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I have no faith at all. I only hold convictions.

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
Hold
Faith
Convictions
Conviction

More quotes by Ayn Rand

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Potentially, a government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.
Ayn Rand
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Compromise now, because you'll have to later, anyway, only then you'll have gone through things you'll wish you hadn't.
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Andrei, did you like the opera? Not particularly. Andrei, do you see what you're missing? I don't think I do, Kira. It's all rather silly. And useless. Can't you enjoy things that are useless, merely because they are beautiful? No. But I enjoyed it. The music? No. The way you listened to it.
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The government has created a nation of paper criminals. People can be put in jail and lose civil rights and liberties through bureaucratic procedures.The only thing that is keeping you out of jail is government goodwill.
Ayn Rand
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The mind is the attribute of man. When man is born, he comes into existence with only one weapon with him--The reasoning mind.
Ayn Rand
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Do you know the hallmark of the second-rater? It's resentment of another man's achievement.
Ayn Rand
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He despised causeless affection, just as he despised unearned wealth. They professed to love him for some unknown reason and they ignored all the things for which he could wish to be loved.
Ayn Rand
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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?
Ayn Rand
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The mark of an honest man... is that he means what he says and knows what he means.
Ayn Rand
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We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.
Ayn Rand
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A moment or an eternity—did it matter? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist.
Ayn Rand
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It's not about who's going to let me it's about who's going to stop me.
Ayn Rand
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Whatever road I take, the guiding star is within me the guiding star and the loadstone which point the way. They point in but one direction. They point to me.
Ayn Rand
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All public projects are mausoleums, not always in shapes, but always in cost.
Ayn Rand
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An emotion is an automatic response, an automatic effect of man's value premises. An effect, not a cause. There is no necessary clash, no dichotomy between man's reason and his emotions
Ayn Rand
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If the rest of them can survive only by destroying us, then why should we wish them to survive? . . . Nothing can make it moral to destroy the best. One can't be punished for being good. One can't be penalized for ability.
Ayn Rand
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When I listen to a symphony I love, I don't get from it what the composer got. His 'Yes' was different from mine. He could have no concern for mine and no exact conception of it. That answer is too personal to each man. But in giving himself what he wanted, he gave me a great experience.
Ayn Rand
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That something happened to you is of no importance to anyone, not even to you. The important thing about you is what you choose to make happen - your values and choices. That which happened by accident - what family you were born into, in what country, and where you went to school - is totally unimportant.
Ayn Rand
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If a life can have a 'theme-song' - and I believe every worthwhile one has - mine is [best] expressed in one word: Individualism.
Ayn Rand
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Indiscriminate tolerance and indiscriminate condemnation are not two opposites: they are two variants of the same evasion.
Ayn Rand