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Ayn Rand

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    Ayn Rand

    Abortion is a moral right-which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved; morally, nothing other than her wish in the matter is to be considered. Who can conceivably have the right to dictate to her what disposition she is to make of the functions of her body?

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    Ayn Rand

    About Mike the construction worker, friend of Roark: "He worshipped expertness of any kind. He loved his work passionately and had no tolerance for anything save for other single-track devotions. He was a master in his own filed and felt no sympathy except for mastery. His view of the world was simple: there were the able and there were the incompetent; he was not concerned with the latter.

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    Ayn Rand

    A building has integrity, just as a man and just as seldom! It must be true to its own idea, have its own form, and serve its own purpose!

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    Ayn Rand

    A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.

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    Ayn Rand

    A BUSINESSMAN cannot force you to buy his product; if he makes a mistake, He suffers the consequences; if he fails, he takes the loss. A bureaucrat, forces you to obey his decisions, whether you agree with him or not... If he makes a mistake, you suffer the consequences; If he fails, He passes the loss on to you, in the form of heavier taxes.

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    Ayn Rand

    A businessman cannot force you to buy his product; if he makes a mistake, he suffers the consequences; if he fails, he takes the loss. If bureaucrat makes a mistake, you suffer the consequences; if he fails, he passes the loss on to you.

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    Ayn Rand

    Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values.

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    Ayn Rand

    Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.

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    Ayn Rand

    A chronic lack of pleasure, of any enjoyable, rewarding or stimulating experiences, produces a slow, gradual, day-by-day erosion of man's emotional vitality, which he may ignore or repress, but which is recorded by the relentless computer of his subconscious mechanism that registers an ebbing flow, then a trickle, then a few last drops of fuel--until the day when his inner motor stops and he wonders desperately why he has no desire to go on, unable to find any definable cause of his hopeless, chronic sense of exhaustion.

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    Ayn Rand

    A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.

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    Ayn Rand

    A “collective” mind does not exist. It is merely the sum of endless numbers of individual minds. If we have an endless number of individual minds who are weak, meek, submissive and impotent – who renounce their creative supremacy for the sake of the “whole” and accept humbly that the “whole’s” verdict – we don’t get a collective super-brain. We get only the weak, meek, submissive and impotent collective mind.

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    Ayn Rand

    A Conformist is a man who declares, "It's true because others believe it" - but an Individualist is NOT a man who declares, "It's true because I believe it." An Individual declares, "I believe it because I see in reason that it is true.

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    Ayn Rand

    A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.

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    Ayn Rand

    Action without thought is mindlessness, and thought without action is hypocritical.

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    Ayn Rand

    A culture is made — or destroyed — by its articulate voices.

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    Ayn Rand

    A desire presupposes the possibility of action to achieve it; action presupposes a goal which is worth achieving.

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    Ayn Rand

    A free mind and a free market are corollaries.

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    Ayn Rand

    A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race - and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin.

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    Ayn Rand

    A good novel is an indivisible sum; every scene, sequence and passage of a good novel has to involve, contribute to and advance all three of its major attributes: theme, plot, characterization.

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    Ayn Rand

    A good quotation must be a complete entity. It must be like a headline - sharp, clear, whole.

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    Ayn Rand

    A government is the most dangerous threat to man

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    Ayn Rand

    A house can have integrity, just like a person.

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    Ayn Rand

    All depressions are caused by government interference and the cure is always offered to take more of the poison that caused the disaster. Depressions are not the result of a free economy.

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    Ayn Rand

    Allies never trust each other, but that doesn't spoil their effectiveness.

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    Ayn Rand

    All life is a purposeful struggle, and your only choice is the choice of a goal.

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    Ayn Rand

    All "public interest' legislation (and any distribution of money taken by force from some men for the unearned benefit of others) comes down ultimately to the grant of an undefined undefinable, non-objective, arbitrary power to some government officials. The worst aspect of it is not that such a power can be used dishonestly, but that it cannot be used honestly. The wisest man in the world, with the purest integrity, cannot find a criterion for the just, equitable, rational application of an unjust, inequitable, irrational principle.

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    Ayn Rand

    All public projects are mausoleums, not always in shapes, but always in cost.

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    Ayn Rand

    All the evils, abuses, and iniquities, popularly ascribed to businessmen and to capitalism, were not caused by an unregulated economy or by a free market, but by government intervention into the economy.

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    Ayn Rand

    All the reasons which made the initiation of physical force evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative.

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    Ayn Rand

    All work is an act of philosophy.

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    Ayn Rand

    Altruism declares that any action taken for the benefit of others is good, and any action taken for one's own benefit is evil. Thus the beneficiary of an action is the only criterion of moral value - and so long as that beneficiary is anybody other than oneself, anything goes.

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    Ayn Rand

    Altruism does not mean mere kindness or generosity, but the sacrifice of the best among men to the worst, the sacrifice of virtues to flaws, of ability to incompetence, of progress to stagnation-and the subordinating of all life and of all values to the claims of anyone's suffering.

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    Ayn Rand

    [Altruism] is a moral system which holds that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the sole justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, value and virtue. This is the moral base of collectivism, of all dictatorships.

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    Ayn Rand

    A majority vote is not an epistemological validation of an idea. Voting is merely a proper political device--within a strictly, constitutionall y delimited sphere of action--for choosing the practical means of implementing a society’s basic principles. But those principles are not determined by vote.

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    Ayn Rand

    A man doesn't borrow pieces of his body. A building doesn't borrow hunks of its soul. Its maker gives it the soul and every wall, window and stairway to express it.

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    Ayn Rand

    A man of independent judgment is a man of profound self-esteem.

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    Ayn Rand

    A man's rights are not violated by a private individual's refusal to deal with him.

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    Ayn Rand

    A man who seeks escape from the responsibility of supporting his life by his own thought and effort, and wishes to survive by conquering, ruling and exploiting others, is NOT an Individualist.

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    Ayn Rand

    America's abundance was not created by public sacrifices to the common good, but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes.

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    Ayn Rand

    America's abundance was created not by public sacrifices to the common good, but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America's industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages, and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance- and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way.

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    Ayn Rand

    America's founding Ideal was the principle of individual rights. Nothing more - and nothing less.

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    Ayn Rand

    America’s founding ideal was the principle of individual rights. Nothing more-and nothing less. The rest-everything that America achieved, everything she became, everything 'noble and just,' and heroic, and great, and unprecedented in human history-was the logical consequence of fidelity to that one principle.

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    Ayn Rand

    America's skyscrapers were not built by public funds nor for a public purpose: they were built by the energy, initiative and wealth of private individuals for personal profit. And, instead of impoverishing the people, these skyscrapers, as they rose higher and higher, kept raising the people's standard of living - including the inhabitants of the slums.

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    Ayn Rand

    A 'mixed economy' is a society in the process of committing suicide.

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    Ayn Rand

    A moment or an eternity—did it matter? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist.

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    Ayn Rand

    A morality that holds need as a claim, holds emptiness-non-existence-as its standard of value; it rewards an absence, a defect: weakness, inability, incompetence, suffering, disease, disaster, the lack, the fault, the flaw-the zero.

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    Ayn Rand

    A mystic is a man who treats his feelings as tools of cognition.

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    Ayn Rand

    An animal is equipped for sustaining its life; its senses provide it with an automatic code of action, an automatic knowledge of what is good for it or evil... Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice.

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    Ayn Rand

    An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

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    Ayn Rand

    An attempt to achieve the good by force is like an attempt to provide a man with a picture gallery at the price of cutting out his eyes.