Ayn Rand Quotes
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Selfishness does not mean only to do things for one's self. One may do things, affecting others, for his own pleasure and benefit. This is not immoral, but the highest of morality.
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I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows.
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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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Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's individual value-judgments.
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Any group or 'collective,' large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members.
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Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration.
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A crime is the violation of the right(s) of other men by force (or fraud). It is only the initiation of physical force against others- i.e., the recourse to violence- that can be classified as a crime in a free society (as distinguished from a civil wrong). Ideas, in a free society, are not a crime- and neither can they serve as the justification of a crime.
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A culture is made - or destroyed - by its articulate voices.
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The conservatives see man as a body freely roaming the earth, building sand piles or factories-with an electronic computer inside his skull, controlled from Washington. The liberals see man as a soul freewheeling to the farthest reaches of the universe-but wearing chains from nose to toes when he crosses the street to buy a loaf of bread.
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There is a kind of malicious wink, a contemptuous sneer in the public voices claiming the hippies as heroes. The hippies are a desperate herd looking for a master, to be taken over by anyone - anyone who would tell them how to live without demanding the effort of thinking. Theirs is the mentality ready for a fuhrer.
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The worst evil that you can do, psychologically, is to laugh at yourself. That means spitting in your own face.
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Some day, the world will discover that, without thought, there can be no love.
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Remember also that the smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
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The men who attempt to survive, not by means of reason, but by means of force, are attempting to survive by the method of animals.
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The human race has only two unlimited capacities: one for suffering and one for lying. I want to fight religion as the root of all human lying and the only excuse for human suffering.
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The trouble with the world today is philosophical: only the right philosophy can save us. But this party plagiarizes some of my ideas, mixes them with the exact opposite-with religionists, anarchists and every intellectual misfit and scum they can find-and call themselves libertarians and run for office.
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In the temple of his spirit, each man is alone.
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On second handers: They are always concerned with people - not facts, ideas, work or production. What would happen to the world without those who think, work, and produce?
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There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism-by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide.