"There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist."
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Ayn Rand quotes (page 8 of 53)
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"Under the antitrust laws, a man becomes a criminal from the moment he goes into business, no matter what he does. If he complies with one of these laws, he faces criminal prosecution under several others. For instance, if he charges prices which some bureaucrats judge as too high, he can be prosecuted for monopoly or for a successful 'intent to monopolize'; if he charges prices lower than those of his competitors, he can be prosecuted for 'unfair competition' or 'restraint of trade'; and if he charges the same prices as his competitors, he can be prosecuted for 'collusion' or 'conspiracy.'"
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"The Argument from Intimidation is a confession of intellectual impotence."
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"I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."
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"A 'mixed economy' is a society in the process of committing suicide."
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"If capitalism had never existed, any honest humanitarian should have been struggling to invent it. But when you see men struggling to evade its existence, to misrepresent its nature, and to destroy its last remnants - you maybe sure that whatever their motives, love of man is not one of them."
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"A man's ego is the fountainhead of human progress."
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"To be the kind of writer you want to be, you must first be the kind of thinker you want to be."
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"I can say-not as a patriotic bromide, but with full knowledge of the necessary metaphysical, epistemological , ethical, political and esthetic roots-that the United States of America is the greatest, the noblest and, in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world."
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"It is a free market that makes monopolies impossible."
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"But I still wonder how it was possible, in those graceless years of transition, long ago, that men did not see whither they were going, and went on, in blindness and cowardice, to their fate. I wonder, for it is hard for me to conceive how men who knew the word "I," could give it up and not know what they lost. But such has been the story, for I have lived in the City of the damned, and I know what horror men permitted to be brought upon them."
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"A man doesn't borrow pieces of his body. A building doesn't borrow hunks of its soul. Its maker gives it the soul and every wall, window and stairway to express it."
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"The essential characteristic of socialism is the denial of individual property rights."
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"When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit."
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"Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think."
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"Collectivism holds that the individual has no rights, that his life and work belong to the group (to "society," to the tribe, the state, the nation) and that the group may sacrifice him at its own whim to its own interests. The only way to implement a doctrine of that kind is by means of brute force - and statism has always been the poltical corollary of collectivism."
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"Civilization is the process of setting man free from men."
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"Never think of pain or danger or enemies a moment longer than is necessary to fight them."
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"A rational man never distorts or corrupts his own standards and judgment in order to appeal to the irrationality, stupidity, or dishonesty of others."
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"Collectivism is the ancient principle of savagery. ... Collectivism is not the 'New Order of Tomorrow.' It is the order of a very dark yesterday."
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