"I don't wish to be the symbol of anything. I'm only myself."
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Ayn Rand quotes (page 28 of 53)
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"Whoever defends his own rights defends the rights of all."
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"If it were true that men could achieve their good by means of turning some men into sacrificial animals, and ... if I were asked to serve the interests of society apart from, above and against my own I would refuse... I would fight in the full confidence of the justice of my battle and of a living being's right to exist."
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"I don’t approve of religion."
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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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"Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man's values, it has to be earned."
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"Worry is a waste of emotional reserve"."
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"I think. I am. I will."
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"Observe how many people evade, rationalize and drive their minds into a state of blind stupor, in dread of discovering that those they deal with- their "loved ones" or friends or business associates or political rulers- are not merely mistaken, but evil. Observe that this dread leads them to sanction, to help and to spread the very evil whose existence they fear to acknowledge."
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"Volumes can be and have been written about the issue of freedom versus dictatorship, but, in essence, it comes down to a single question: do you consider it moral to treat men as sacrificial animals and to rule them by physical force?"
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"Reality confronts man with a great many musts, but all of them are conditional the formula of realistic necessity is You must, if and the if stands for man's choice"
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"Face a challenge and find joy in the capacity to meet it."
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"Creation comes before distribution - or there will be nothing to distribute. The need of the creator comes before the need of any possible beneficiary. Yet we are taught to admire the second-hander who dispenses gifts he has not produced above the man who made the gifts possible. We praise an act of charity. We shrug at an act of achievement."
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"In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that man’s proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads."
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"What is a demanding pleasure that demands the use of ones mind! Not in the sense of problem solving, but in the sense of exercising discrimination, judgment, awareness."
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"Competition is a by-product of productive work, not its goal."
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"What you think is an illusion created by your glands, your emotions and, in the last analysis, by the content of your stomach. That gray matter you're so proud of is like a mirror in an amusement park which transmits to you nothing but distorted signals from reality forever beyond your grasp."
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"The age of the skyscraper is gone. This is the age of the housing project. Which is always a prelude to the age of the cave."
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"A rational process is a moral process."
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"Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live."
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