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The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone.
AYN RAND, The Virtue of Selfishness
A culture is made -- or destroyed -- by its articulate voices.
AYN RAND, The Voice of Reason
So you think that money is the root of all evil? Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal wlth one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?
The skyline of New York is a monument of a splendour that no pyramids or palaces will ever equal or approach.
AYN RAND, The Virtue of Selfishness
A gun is not an argument.
AYN RAND, Capitalism: The Unknown Deal
Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values.
The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.
AYN RAND, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
Whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man's nature and of life's potential.
AYN RAND, The Fountainhead
Honor is self-esteem made visible in action.
AYN RAND, The Ayn Rand Letter, Jan. 14, 1974
America's abundance was created not 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. They did not starve the people to pay for America's industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages, and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance -- and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way.
AYN RAND, Capitalism: The Unknown Deal
Guilt is a rope that wears thin.
It's true that there's no such thing as free will. We can't help what we are or what we do. It's not our fault. Nobody's to blame for anything. It's all in your background ... and your glands. If you're good, that's no achievement of yours -- you were lucky in your glands. If you're rotten, nobody should punish you -- you were unlucky, that's all.
AYN RAND, The Fountainhead
That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call "free will" is your mind's freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and character. Thinking is man's only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of your practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one's consciousness, the refusal to think -- not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment.
Honest people are never touchy about the matter of being trusted.
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.
AYN RAND, The Fountainhead
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