Ayn Rand Quotes

Great men can't be ruled.

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Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice. If he abdicates his power, he abdicates the status of man, and the grinding chaos of the irrational is what he achieves as his sphere of existence by his own choice.

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Force and mind are opposites morality ends where a gun begins.

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Do it first and feel about it afterwards.

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Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness not pain or mindless self-indulgence is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values.

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Neither am I the means to any end others may wish to accomplish. I am not a tool for their use. I am not a servant of their needs. I am not a bandage for their wounds. I am not a sacrifice on their altars.

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The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there arent enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.

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The only purpose of education is to teach a student how to live his life-by developing his mind and equipping him to deal with reality. The training he needs is theoretical, i.e., conceptual. He has to be taught to think, to understand, to integrate, to prove. He has to be taught the essentials of the knowledge discovered in the past-and he has to be equipped to acquire further knowledge by his own effort.

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Just as I support my life, neither by robbery nor alms, but by my own effort, so I do not seek to derive my happiness from the injury or the favour others of, but earn it by my own achievement. Just as I do not consider the pleasure of others as the goal of my life, so I do not consider my pleasure as the goal of the lives of others. Just as there are no contradictions in my values and no conflicts among my desires so there are no victims and no conflicts of interest among rational men, men who do not desire the unearned and do not view one another with a cannibal's lust, men who neither make sacrifice nor accept them.

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I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.

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So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate the use of physical force against others.... When a man attempts to deal with me by force, I answer him by force. It is only as retaliation that force may be used and only against the man who starts its use. No, I do not share his evil or sink to his concept of morality I merely grant him his choice, destruction, the only destruction he had the right to choose his own.

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Guilt is a rope that wears thin.

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I am speaking to those among you who have retained some sovereign shred of their soul, unsold and unstamped ' to the order of others'. If, in the chaos of the motives that have made you listen to the radio tonight, there was an honest, rational desire to learn what is wrong with the world, you are the man whom I wished to address. By the rules and terms of my code, one owes a rational statement to those whom it does concern and who are making an effort to know. Those who are making an effort to fail to understand me, are not a concern of mine.

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America's abundance was not created by public sacrifices to 'the common good,' but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes.

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Whatever road I take, the guiding star is within me the guiding star and the loadstone which point the way. They point in but one direction. They point to me.

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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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Get the hell out of my way

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What I want you to understand, is the full evil of those who claim to have become convinced that this earth, by its nature, is a realm of malevolence where the good has no chance to win. Let them check their premises. Let them check their standards of value. Let them check before they grant themselves the unspeakable license of evil-as-necessity whether they know what is the good and what are the conditions it requires.

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Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

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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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Since a rational man's ambition is unlimited, since his pursuit and achievement of values is a lifelong process and the higher the values, the harder the struggle he needs a moment, an hour or some period of time in which he can experience the sense of his completed task, the sense of living in a universe where his values have been successfully achieved. It is like a moment of rest, a moment to gain fuel to move farther.

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There can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions to an individual, but permitted to a mob.

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If there is any one proof of a man's incompetence, it is the stagnant mentality of a worker who, doing some small routine job in a vast undertaking, does not care to look beyond the lever of a machine, does not choose to know how the machine got there or what makes his job possible, and proclaims that the management of the undertaking is parasitical and unnecessary.

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The idea that 'the public interest' supersedes private interests and rights can have but one meaning that the interests and rights of some individuals take precedence over the interests and rights of others.

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Yes ... Yes, I feel that there's no chance for me to exist, if they do ... no chance, no room, no world I can cope with.... I don't want to feel it, I keep pushing it back, but it's coming closer and I know I have no place to run.... I can't explain what it feels like, I can't catch hold of it and that's path of the terror, that you can't catch hold of anything it's as if the whole world were suddenly destroyed, but not by an explosion an explosion is something hard and solid but destroyed by ... by some horrible kind of softening ... as if nothing were solid, nothing held any shape at all, and you could poke your finger through stone walls and the stone would give, like jelly, and mountains would slither, and buildings would switch their shapes like clouds and that would be the end of the world, not fire and brimstone, but goo.

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