"Man's character is the product of his premises."
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Ayn Rand quotes (page 27 of 53)
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"There is no such dichotomy as 'human rights' versus 'property rights.' No human rights can exist without property rights."
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"If some men are entitled by right to the products of the work of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labor."
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"The right of a nation to determine its own form of government does not include the right to establish a slave society (that is, to legalize the enslavement of some men by others). There is no such thing as "the right to enslave." A nation can do it, just as a man can become a criminal- but neither can do it by right."
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"That which is not worth contemplating in life, is not worth recreating in art."
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"Have you noticed that the imbecile always smiles? Man's first frown is the first touch of God on his forehead. The touch of thought."
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"Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth, the man who would make his fortune no matter where he started."
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"A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality."
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"That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call 'free will' is your mind's freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character."
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"That love is reverence, and worship, and glory, and the upward glance. Not a bandage for dirty sores. But they don’t know it. Those who speak of love most promiscuously are the ones who’ve never felt it. They make some sort of feeble stew out of sympathy, compassion, contempt, and general indifference, and they call it love. Once you’ve felt what it means to love as you and I know it – the total passion for the total height – you’re incapable of anything less."
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"An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature."
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"A 'whim' is a desire experienced by a person who does not know and does not care to discover its cause."
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"The nation which once held the creed that greatness is achieved by production, is now told that it is achieved by squalor."
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"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of other men. Blood, whips and guns--or dollars. Take your choice--there is no other."
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"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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"It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money.... Let me give you a tip on men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it. Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the...bell of an approaching looter."
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"Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life. Redeem your mind from the hockshops of authority. Accept the fact that you are not omniscient, but playing a zombie will not give you omniscience-that your mind is fallible, but becoming mindless will not make you infallible-that an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error."
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"The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence."
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"Ordinary human concern for human distress does not manifest itself ordinarily in the form of a gun aimed at the wallets and earnings of one's neighbors."
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"I want to know that I've accomplished something. I want to feel that it had some meaning. At the last summing up, I want to be sure it wasn't all-for nothing."
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