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bc02a3d
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What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge--he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil--he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor--he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experie..
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Ayn Rand |
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2c25e41
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I don't build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build!":"
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Ayn Rand |
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c59bda1
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It doesn't say much. Only "Howard Roark, Architect". But it's like those mottoes men carved over the entrance of a castle and died for. It's a challenge in the face of something so vast and so dark, that all the pain on earth - and do you know how much suffering there is on earth? - all the pain comes from that thing y...ou are going to face. I don't know what it is, I don't know why it should be unleashed against you. I know only that it w..
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Ayn Rand |
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1074f9a
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What is kinder--to believe the best of people and burden them with a nobility beyond their endurance--or to see them as they are, and accept it because it makes them comfortable?
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kindness
justice
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Ayn Rand |
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61350ab
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Theirs is the banner in my hand. And I wish I had the power to tell them that the despair of their hearts was not to be final, and their night was not without hope. For the battle they lost can never be lost. For that which they died to save can never perish. Through all the darkness, through all the shame of which men are capable, the spirit of man will remain alive on this earth. It may sleep, but it will awaken. It may wear chains, but i..
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Ayn Rand |
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cd87c91
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The Argument from Intimidation is a confession of intellectual impotence.
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Ayn Rand |
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95bbd97
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She had won the battle against her memories. But one form of torture remained, untouched by the years, the torture of the word "why?"
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Ayn Rand |
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552e45f
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We, Equality 7-2521, were not happy in those year in the Home of the Students. It was not that the learning was too hard for us. It was that the learning was too easy. This is a great sin, to be born with a head which is too quick. It is not good to be different from our brothers, but it is evil to be superior to them. The Teachers told us so, and they frowned when they looked at us.
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individuality
intelligence
objectivism
schooling
teachers
students
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Ayn Rand |
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64f1701
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The audience looked at him. They felt he had no chance. They could drop the nameless resentment, the sense of insecurity which he aroused in most people. And so, for the first time, they could see him as he was: a man totally innocent of fear. The fear of which they thought was not the normal kind, not a response to a tangible danger, but the chronic, unconfessed fear in which they all lived. They remembered the misery of the moments when, ..
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Ayn Rand |
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7f3a66b
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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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Ayn Rand |
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00eebcc
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You are damned, and we wish to share your damnation.
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Ayn Rand |
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571fb96
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I think it's a sin to sit down and let your life go without making a try for it.
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Ayn Rand |
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fd59d2a
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If this is vise I want no virtue. ... I know what happiness is possible to me on earth. And my happiness needs no higher aim to vindicate it. My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose. 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 alt..
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virtue
vice
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Ayn Rand |
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fef8161
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Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.
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Ayn Rand |
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3a5442e
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Rationality is the recognition of the fact that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it.
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Ayn Rand |
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dc7f018
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How did you know what's been killing me? Slowly, for years, driving me to hate people when I don't want to hate... Have you felt it, too? Have you seen how your best friends love everything about you--except the things that count? And your most important is nothing to them, nothing, not even a sound they can recognize. You mean, you want to hear? You want to know what I do and why I do it, you want to know what I think? It's not boring to y..
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howard-roark
mallory
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Ayn Rand |
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ba02a7c
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Yes! And isn't that the root of every despicable action? 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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Ayn Rand |
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6158c75
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Because the beauty of the human body is that it hasn't a single muscle which doesn't serve its purpose; that there's not a line wasted; that every detail of it fits one idea, the idea of a man and the life of a man.
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Ayn Rand |
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cd1a395
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An Individualist is a man who lives for his own sake and by his own mind; he neither sacrifices himself to others nor sacrifices others to himself; he deals with men as a trader - not as a looter; as a producer - not as a Attila.
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trader
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Ayn Rand |
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82f1e89
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The first right on earth is the right of the ego. Man's first duty is to himself. His moral law is never to place his prime goal within the persons of others. His moral obligation is to do what he wishes, provided his wish does not depend primarily upon other men.
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Ayn Rand |
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8b71e73
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No happy person can be quite so impervious to pain (Gail Wynand to Dominique Francon)
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objectivism
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Ayn Rand |
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ac8c28b
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When a man feels fear without reason, you call him to the attention of a psychiatrist; you are not so careful to protect the meaning, the nature and the dignity of love.
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Ayn Rand |
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2c221b3
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He stood naked at the edge of a cliff. THe lake lay far below him. A frozen explosion of granite burst in flight to the sky over motionless water. The water seemed immovable, the stone- flowing. The stone had the stillness of one last movement when thrust meets thrust and the currents are held in a pause more dynamic than motion. THe stone glowed wet with sunrays. The lake below was only a thin steel ring that cut the rocks in half. The roc..
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Ayn Rand |
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573cd06
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how did you do it? How did you manage to remain unmangled?" "By holding on to just one rule." "Which?" "To place nothing-nothing-above the verdict of my own mind."
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Ayn Rand |
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2bc9065
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Then she remembered.
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Ayn Rand |
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8992607
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The view that man was ever to be drawn by some vision of the unattainable shining ahead, doomed ever to aspire, but not to achieve, my life and my values could not bring me to that.
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philosophy
taggart
objectivism
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Ayn Rand |
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aade5ed
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The people had come to witness a sensational case, to see celebrities, to get material for conversation, to be seen, to kill time. They would return to unwanted jobs, unloved families, unchosen friends, to drawing rooms, evening clothes, cocktail glasses and movies, to unadmitted pain, murdered hope, desire left unreached, left hanging silently over a path on which no step was taken, to days of effort not to think, not to say, to forget and..
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introspective
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Ayn Rand |
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f08f038
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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
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groupthink
masses
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Ayn Rand |
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7e25fa9
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It is a sin to think words no others think
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Ayn Rand |
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37803ab
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The man who is proudly certain of his own value, will want the highest type of woman he can find, the woman he admires, the strongest, the hardest to conquer--because only the possession of a heroine will give him the sense of an achievement, not the possession of a brainless slut.
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Ayn Rand |
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27c68e0
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Through the dry phases of calculations in her mind, she noticed that she did have time to feel something: it was the hard, exhilarating pleasure of action.
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Ayn Rand |
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b612a7b
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He, too, stood looking at her for a moment--and it seemed to her that it was not a look of greeting after an absence, but the look of someone who had thought of her every day of that year. She could not be certain, it was only an instant, so brief that just as she caught it, he was turning to a point at the birch tree behind him saying the the tone of their childhood game: 'I'd wish you'd learn to run faster I'll always have to wait for yo..
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Ayn Rand |
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2714d3c
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Now observe that in all the propaganda of the ecologists--amidst all their appeals to nature and pleas for "harmony with nature"--there is no discussion of man's needs and the requirements of his survival. Man is treated as if he were an unnatural phenomenon. Man cannot survive in the kind of state of nature that the ecologists envision--i.e., on the level of sea urchins or polar bears.... In order to survive, man has to discover and produc..
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nature
manufacturing
productivity
survival
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Ayn Rand |
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8cd916f
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Sacrifice is the surrender of that which you value in favor of which you dont
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Ayn Rand |
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9264d63
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Do not make the mistake of the ignorant who think that an individualist is a man who says: "I'll do as I please at everybody else's expense." An individualist is a man who recognizes the inalienable individual rights of man--his own and those of others." --
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Ayn Rand |
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1c28b0b
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And I wish I had the power to tell tem that the despair of their hearts was not to be final, and their night was not without hope. For the battle they lost can never be lost.
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Ayn Rand |
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50e2041
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For they have nothing to fight me with, save the brute force of their numbers. I have my mind.
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Ayn Rand |
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aa46831
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She fell asleep, lying there, her hand clasping his. Her last awareness, before she surrendered the responsibility of consciousness, was the sense of an enormous void, the void of a city and of a continent, where she would never be able to find the man whom she had no right to seek.
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Ayn Rand |
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d1fd502
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The pressure disappeared with the first word he put on paper. He thought--while his hand moved rapidly--what a power there was in words; later, for those who heard them, but first for the one who found them; a healing power, a solution, like the breaking of a barrier. He thought, perhaps the basic secret the scientists have not discovered, the first fount of life, is that which happens when a thought takes shape in words.
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words
power-of-words
writing-process
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Ayn Rand |
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e4e922c
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Volumes can be and have been written about the issue of freedom versus dictatorship, but, in essence, it comes down to a single question:
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Ayn Rand |
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5ff2d64
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Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes.
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racism
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Ayn Rand |
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6ebf6b7
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You see, I love you. And love is exception-making. If you were in love you'd want to be broken, trampled, dominated, because that's the impossible, the inconceivable for you in your relations with people. That would be the one gift, the great exception you'd want to offer the man you loved. But it wouldn't be easy for you.
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Ayn Rand |
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f00a2f4
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I think that when in doubt about the truth of an issue, it's safer and in better taste to select the least numerous of the adversaries.
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doubt
truth
minority-opinion
subversion
oppression
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Ayn Rand |
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baaf609
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I am neither foe nor friend to my brothers, but such as each of them shall deserve of me. And to earn my love, my brothers must do more than to have been born. I do not grant my love without reason, nor to any chance passer-by who may wish to claim it. I honor men with my love. But honor is a thing to be earned. I shall choose friends among men, but neither slaves nor masters. And I shall choose only such as please me, and them I shall love..
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love
individual
pride
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Ayn Rand |