"To hold an unchanging youth is to reach at the end, the vision with which one started."
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Ayn Rand quotes (page 37 of 53)
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"In a fully free society, taxation-or, to be exact, payment for governmental services-would be voluntary."
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"Roark smiled, "Gail, if this boat were sinking, I'd give my life to save you. Not because it's any kind of duty. Only because I like you, for reasons and standards of my own. I could die for you. But I couldn't and wouldn't live for you."
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"A spirit, too, needs fuel. It can run dry."
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"Not selfishness, but precisely the absence of a self. Look at them. The man who cheats and lies, but preserves a respectable front. He knows himself to be dishonest, but others think he’s honest and he derives his self-respect from that, second-hand. The man who takes credit for an achievement which is not his own. He knows himself to be mediocre, but he’s great in the eyes of others."
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"It's not a question of who will allow me to do it, it's a question of who will stop me."
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"Genius is an exaggeration of dimension. So is elephantiasis. Both may be only a disease."
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"Did I feel a physical desire for him? I did. Was I moved by a passion of my body? I was. Have I experienced the most violent form of sensual pleasure? I have."
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"Fransisco, you're some kind of very high nobility, aren't you?" He answered, "Not yet. The reason my family has lasted for such a long time is that none of us has ever been permitted to think he is born a d'Anconia. We are expected to become one."
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"Sacrifice does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious"
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"I am only concerned with politics so I may see the day when I don't have to be concerned with politics."
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"It is a matter of record that in the German Election of 1933, the Communist Party was ordered by its leaders to vote for the Nazis - with the explanation that they could later fight the Nazis for power, but first they had to help destroy their common enemy : capitalism and its parliamentary form of government."
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"All public projects are mausoleums, not always in shapes, but always in cost."
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"What whip lashed them to their knees in shame and submission? The worship of the word "We."
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"I hold that such a question can never arise except in a society of cannibals."
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"Learn to distinguish the difference between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality"
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"I like to think of fire held in a man's hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what great things have come from such hours. When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind--and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression."
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"Emotions are inherent in your nature, but their content is dictated by your mind. Your emotional capacity is an empty motor, and your values are the fuel with which your mind fills it."
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"A society without intellectuals is like a body without a head"
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"Men prosper or fail, survive or perish in proportion to the degree of their rationality."
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