"One can't love man without hating most of the creatures who pretend to bear his name."
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Ayn Rand quotes (page 42 of 53)
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"That time and those people are upon you!"
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"She's a writer. The kind of writer who wouldn't be published outside. She believes that when one deals with words, one deals with the mind."
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"They talked about nothing in particular, sentences that had meaning only in the sound of the voices, in warm gaiety, in the ease of complete relaxation."
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"Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade."
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"I do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and I do not live in chronic dread of disaster. It is no happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that I regard as the abnormal exception in Human Life."
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"Ferris: Are you going to be as impractical as that? Rearden: The evaluation of an action as practical, Dr. Ferris, depends on what it is that one wishes to practice. Ferris: Haven't you always placed your self-interest above all else? Rearden: That is what I am doing right now."
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"you are never called upon to prove a negative. that's a law of logic."
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"Do not set out to write with your eyes on the box office. It can't be done."
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"Hence the sterile, uninspiring futility of a great many theoretical discussions of ethics, and the resentment which many people feel towards such discussions: moral principles remain in their minds as floating abstractions, offering them a goal they cannot grasp and demanding that they reshape their souls in its image, thus leaving them with a burden of undefinable moral guilt."
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"Francisco could do anything he undertook, he could do it better than anyone else, and he did it without effort. There was no boasting in his manner and consciousness, no thought of comparison. His attitude was not: 'I can do it better than you,' but simply: 'I can do it.' What he meant by doing was doing superlatively."
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"Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot."
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"It is not as late as you think. It is merely early - in the age of the rebirth of individualism."
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"You'll come back, because yours is an error of knowledge, not a moral failure, not an act of surrender to evil, but only the last act of being victim to your own virtue. We'll wait for you and when you come back, you will have discovered that there need never be any conflict among your desires, nor so tragic a clash of values as the one you've borne so well."
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"Married people dont look like they have bedrooms on their minds when they look at each other. In this world, either you're virtuous or you enjoy yourself. Not both...Not both."
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"It is one's own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns, and derives from love."
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"You will follow me, if we are what we are, you and I, if we live, if the world exists, if you know the meaning of this moment and can't let it slip by, as others let it slip, into the senselessness of the unwilled and unreached."
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"If you tell an amateur that his story is not good, he always declares indignantly: 'Oh, but it really happened just like this!' The writer who doesn't understand that this is beside the point is not a writer at all."
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"It's so graceless, being a martyr. It's honoring your adversaries too much."
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"p.61 He [Roark] was usually disliked, from the first sight of his face, anywhere he went. His face was closed like the door of a safety vault; things locked in safety vaults are valuable; men did not care to feel that. He was a cold, disquieting presence in the room; his presence had a strange quality: it made itself felt and yet it made them feel that he was not there; or perhaps that he was and they weren't."
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