Ayn Rand Quotes - 101 quotes

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Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand (1905-1982) was a Russian-American writer and philosopher. She is best known for her novels "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged," as well as for developing a philosophical system she called Objectivism. She was born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum on February 2, 1905, in St. Petersburg, Russi... show more

quote icon “Axiomatic concepts are the guardians of man’s mind and the foundation of reason—the keystone, touchstone and hallmark of reason—and if reason is to be destroyed, it is axiomatic concepts that have to be destroyed.”

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quote icon When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket.

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quote icon 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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quote icon In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade the effort. But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival.

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quote icon Those who seek to destroy this country, seek to disarm it - intellectually and physically. But it is not a mere political issue; politics is not the cause, but the last consequence of philosophical ideas.

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quote icon “Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist.”

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quote icon Since the definition of a concept is formulated in terms of other concepts, it enables man, not only to identify and retain a concept, but also to establish the relationships, the hierarchy, the integration of all his concepts and thus the integration of his knowledge.

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quote icon Intellectual honesty consists in taking ideas seriously. To take ideas seriously means that you intend to live by, to practice, any idea you accept as true.

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quote icon The men who are not interested in philosophy absorb its principles from the cultural atmosphere around them...

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quote icon A definition is not a description; it implies, but does not mention all the characteristics of a concept's units...A definition must identify the nature of the units, i.e., the essential characteristics without which the units would not be the kind of existents they are.

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quote icon But it is important to remember that a definition implies all the characteristics of the units, since it identifies their essential, not their exhasustive, characteristics;

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quote icon All definitions are contextual, and a primitive definition does not contradict a more advanced one: the latter merely expands the former.

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quote icon A contextual definition can be formulated only after one has fully considered all the known facts pertaining to the units in question.

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quote icon Although the definition explicitly mentions only the essential characteristic(s), it implies and condenses all of this knowledge.

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quote icon On a rational view of definitions, a definition organizes and condenses - and thus helps one to retain - a wealth of knowledge about the characteristics of a concept's units.

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quote icon Honor is self-esteem made visible in action.

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quote icon Thus a definition complies with the two essential functions of consciousness: differentiation and integration. The differentia isolates the units of a concept from all other existents; the genus indicates their connection to a wider group of existents.

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quote icon The assignment I gave myself for tonight is not to sell you on my philosophy, but on philosophy as such…What is my selfish interest in the matter? I am confident enough to think that if you accept the importance of philosophy and the task of examining it critically, it is my philosophy that you will come to accept. Formally, I call it Objectivism, but informally I call it a philosophy for living on earth.

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quote icon The nominalist and the conceptualist schools regard concepts as subjective, i.e. as products of man's consciousness, unrelated to the facts of reality, as mere "names" or notions arbitrarily assigned to arbitrary groupings of concretes on the ground of vague, inexplicable resemblances.

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quote icon Ayn Rand: “When men abandon reason, they find not only that their emotions cannot guide them, but that they can experience no emotions save one: terror.”

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quote icon Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct. The function of your stomach, lungs or heart is automatic; the function of your mind is not. In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade that effort. But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival - so that for you, who are a human being, the question "to be or not to be" is the question "to think or not to think".

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quote icon Intellectual honesty [involves] knowing what one does know, constantly expanding one’s knowledge, and never evading or failing to correct a contradiction. This means: the development of an active mind as a permanent attribute.

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quote icon To know the exact meaning of the concepts one is using, one must know their correct definitions, one must be able to retrace the specific (logical, not chronological) steps by which they were formed, and one must be able to demonstrate their connection to their base in perceptual reality.

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quote icon Emotions are not tools of cognition.

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quote icon Nothing is given to man automatically, neither knowledge, nor self-confidence, nor inner serenity, nor the right way to use his mind. Every value he needs or wants has to be discovered, learned and acquired...

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quote icon I use the word ‘rightist’ to denote the views of those who are predominantly in favor of individual freedom and capitalism—and the word ‘leftist’ to denote the views of those who are predominantly in favor of government controls and socialism.

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quote icon When men abandon reason, they find not only that their emotions cannot guide them, but that they can experience no emotions save one: terror.

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quote icon Mysticism is the acceptance of allegations without evidence or proof, either apart from or against the evidence of one’s senses and one’s reason. Mysticism is the claim to some non-sensory, non-rational, non-definable, non-identifiable means of knowledge… (

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quote icon One of the cardinal pleasures of life is offered to man by works of art. Art, at its highest potential, as the projection of things as they might and ought to be, can provide man with an invaluable emotional fuel. But, again, the kind of art works one responds to, depends on one's deepest values and premises.

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quote icon If a society is to be free, its government has to be controlled.

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quote icon “Creation” does not (and metaphysically cannot) mean the power to bring something into existence out of nothing. “Creation” means the power to bring into existence an arrangement (or combination or integration) of natural elements that had not existed before.

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quote icon Axiomatic concepts are the guardians of man’s mind and the foundation of reason—the key-stone, touchstone and hallmark of reason—and if reason is to be destroyed, it is axiomatic concepts that have to be destroyed…By debunking these axiomatic concepts you debunk all philosophies along with any quest for wisdom ‘in one fell swoop’. In short, without these axiomatic concepts philosophy becomes fruitless and pointless as it has no way to get off the ground.

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quote icon Your subconscious is like a computer and its main function is the integration of your ideas. Who programs it? Your conscious mind. If you default, if you don't reach any firm convictions, your subconscious is programmed by chance - and you deliver yourself into the power of ideas you do not know you have accepted. But one way or the other, your computer gives you print-outs, daily and hourly, in the form of emotions - which are lightning-like estimates of the things around you, calculated according to your values. If you programmed your computer by conscious thinking, you know the nature of your values and emotions. If you didn't, you don’t.

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quote icon You have no choice about the necessity to integrate your observations, your experiences, your knowledge into abstract ideas, i.e., into principles. Your only choice is whether these principles are true or false, whether they represent your conscious, rational convictions - or a grab-bag of notions snatched at random, whose sources, validity, context and consequences you do not know, notions which, more often than not, you would drop like a hot potato if you knew.

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quote icon You have probably heard the computer operator's eloquent term…"garbage in, garbage out." The same formula applies to the relationship between a man's thinking and his emotions.

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quote icon Evil, not value, is an absence and a negation, evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from us.

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quote icon I saw that evil was impotent-that evil was the irrational, the blind, the anti-real-and that the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it.

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quote icon 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.

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quote icon In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.

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quote icon “Of special significance to the present discussion is the egalitarians’ defiance of the Law of Causality: their demand for equal results from unequal causes – or equal rewards for unequal performance.”

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quote icon If it is now the belief of my fellow men, who call themselves the public, that their good requires victims, then I say: The public good be damned, I will have no part of it!"

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quote icon An axiom is a proposition that defeats its opponents by the fact that they have to accept it and use it in the process of any attempt to deny it.

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quote icon A definition is the condensation of a vast body of observations - and stands or falls with the truth or falsehood of these observations.

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quote icon The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.

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quote icon The truth or falsehood of all man's conclusions, inferences, thought and knowledge rests on the truth or falsehood of his definitions.

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quote icon Collectivism: The practice or principle of giving a group priority over each individual in it. (Google Dictionary) Collectivism holds that man must be chained to collective action and collective thought for the sake of what is called ‘the common good’”.

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quote icon The root of the whole modern disaster is philosophical and moral.

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quote icon An axiomatic concept is the identification of a primary fact of reality, which cannot be analyzed, reduced to other facts or broken into component parts. It is implicit in all facts and in all knowledge. It is the fundamentally given and directly perceived or experienced, which requires no proof or explanation, but on which all proofs and explanations rest.

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quote icon It is crucially important to grasp the fact that a concept is an "open-end" classification which includes the yet-to-be-discovered characteristics of a given group of extents. All of man's knowledge rests on that fact.

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quote icon When the social goal chosen is by its very nature impossible and unworkable (such as collectivism), it is useless to point out to people that the means they’ve chosen to achieve it are unworkable. Such means go with such a goal; there are no others.

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quote icon People are not embracing collectivism because they have accepted bad economics. They are accepting bad economics because they have embraced collectivism.

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quote icon Now the choice of a personal purpose or of a social ideal is a matter of philosophy and moral theory. That is why, if one wishes to cure a dying world, one has to start with moral and philosophical principles. Nothing less will do.

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quote icon For self-preservation to assert itself, there must be some reason for the self to wish to be preserved.

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quote icon That which society accepts as its purpose and ideal (or to be exact, that which men think society should accept as its purpose and ideal) determines the kind of economics men will advocate and attempt to practice; since economics are only the means to an end.

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quote icon You cannot make men abandon the means until you have persuaded them to abandon the goal.

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quote icon “To grasp the axiom that existence exists, means to grasp the fact that nature, i.e., the universe as a whole, cannot be created or annihilated, that it cannot come into or go out of existence.

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quote icon Since a value is that which one acts to gain and/or keep, and the amount of possible action is limited by the duration of one’s lifespan, it is a part of one’s life that one invests in everything one values. The years, months, days or hours of thought, of interest, of action devoted to a value are the currency with which one pays for the enjoyment one receives from it.

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quote icon I work for nothing but my own profit—which I make by selling a product they need to men who are willing and able to buy it. I do not produce it for their benefit at the expense of mine, and they do not buy it for my benefit at the expense of theirs

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quote icon On a rational view of definitions, a definition organizes and condenses - and thus helps one to retain - a wealth of knowledge about the characteristics of a concept's units. On the nominalist view, it is precisely this knowledge that is discarded when one defines a concept: as soon as the defining characteristic is chosen, all the other characteristics of the units are banished from the concept, which shrivels to mean merely the definition.

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quote icon In my morality, the defense of one's country means that a man is personally unwilling to live as the conquered slave of any enemy, foreign or domestic. This is an enormous virtue.

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quote icon The world conflict of today is the conflict of the individual against the state, the same conflict that has been fought throughout mankind’s history. The names change, but the essence—and the results—remain the same, whether it is the individual against feudalism, or against absolute monarchy, or against communism or fascism or Nazism or socialism or the welfare state.

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quote icon “The Pragmatists declared that philosophy must be practical and that practicality consists of dispensing with all absolute principles and standards—that there is no such thing as objective reality or permanent truth—that truth is that which works … and its validity can be judged only by its consequences and whatever one wishes to be true, is true, whatever one wishes to exist, does exist, provided it works or makes one feel better. There are no fixed laws of logic, only mutable ‘conventions,’ without any basis in reality. …There is no objectivity—the object is created by the thought and action of the subject.”

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quote icon “…reality perceived by man’s mind is a distortion. The distorting mechanism is man’s conceptual faculty…[Kant’s] argument, in essence, ran as follows: man is limited to a consciousness of a specific nature, which perceives by specific means and no others, therefore his consciousness is not valid: man is blind, because he has eyes – deaf, because he has ears – deluded, because he has a mind – and the things he perceives do not exist, because of the fact that he perceives them.”

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quote icon 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.

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quote icon “The Platonist school begins by accepting the primacy of consciousness…by assuming that reality must conform to the content of consciousness…that the presence of any notion in man’s mind proves the existence of a corresponding referent in reality.”

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quote icon It is often said that definitions state the meaning of words. This is true, but it is not exact. A word is merely a visual-auditory symbol used to represent a concept; a word has no meaning other than that of the concept it symbolizes, and the meaning of the concept consists of its units. It is not words, but concepts that man defines - by specifying their referents.

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quote icon The purpose of a definition is to distinguish a concept from all other concepts and thus to keep its units differentiated from all other existents.

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quote icon Not all philosophies are evil, though too many of them are, particularly in modern history. Now you may ask: If philosophy can be that evil, why should one study it? Particularly, why should one study the philosophical theories which are blatantly false, make no sense, and bear no relation to real life? My answer is: In self-protection - and in defense of truth, justice, freedom, and any other value you ever held or may ever hold.

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quote icon This argument runs as follows: since men are weak, fallible, non-omniscient and innately depraved, no man may be entrusted with the responsibility of being a dictator and of ruling everybody else; therefore, a free society is the proper way of life for imperfect creatures. Please grasp fully the implications of this argument: since men are depraved, they are not good enough for a dictatorship; freedom is all that they deserve; if they were perfect, they would be worthy of a totalitarian state.

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quote icon Most men spend their days struggling to evade three questions, the answers to which underlie man's every thought, feeling, and action, whether he is consciously aware of it or not: Where am I? How do I know it" What should I do? By the time they are old enough to understand these questions, men believe they know the answers. Where am I? Say, in New York City. How do I know it? It is self-evident. What should I do? Here they are not too sure - but the usual answer is: what everybody else does. The only trouble seems to be that they are not very active, not very confident, not very happy - and they experience, at times, a causeless fear and an unidentified guilt, which they cannot explain or get rid of.

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quote icon Consciousness Definition: Consciousness is the faculty of awareness – the faculty of perceiving that which exists.

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quote icon In physical warfare, you would not send you men into a booby trap: you would make every effort to discover its location. Well, Kant's system is the biggest and most intricate booby trap in the history of philosophy - but it's so full of holes that once you grasp its gimmick, you can diffuse it without any trouble and walk forward over it in perfect safety.

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quote icon “The difference between political power and any other kind of social power … is the fact that a government holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force. … The nature of governmental action is: coercive action. The nature of political power is: the power to force obedience under threat of physical injury – the threat of property expropriation, imprisonment, or death.”

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quote icon The philosophy of Objectivism has three axioms that it holds are implicit in any claim to knowledge of any sort. They are as follows: “Existence exists.” “Consciousness perceives existence.” “An existent is itself.” (Often referred to as “A is A,” or the Law of Identity.) These three metaphysical axioms form the fundamental base of Objectivism. A corollary of the Law of Identity is the Law of Causality, which states that an entity acts as itself.

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quote icon The army of a free country has a great responsibility: the right to use force, but not as an instrument of compulsion and brute conquest - as the armies of other countries have done in their histories - only as an instrument of a free nation's self-defense, which means: the defense of a man's individual rights. The principle of using force only in retaliation against those who initiate its use, is the principle of subordinating might to right. The highest integrity and sense of honor are required for such a task.

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quote icon You cannot hope to effect a cure by starting with a wrong diagnosis.

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quote icon As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation - or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, unidentified contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind's wings should have grown.

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quote icon The answers given by ethics determine how man should treat other men, and this determines the fourth branch of philosophy: politics, which defines the principles of a proper social system.

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quote icon The battle of philosophers is a battle for man's mind. If you do not understand their theories, you are vulnerable to the worst among them.

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quote icon The best way to study philosophy is to approach it as one approaches a detective story: follow every trail, clue and implication, in order to discover who is a murderer and who is a hero.

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quote icon You cannot reverse cause and effect. And you cannot destroy the cause by fighting the effect. That is as futile as trying to eliminate the symptoms of a disease without attacking its germs.

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quote icon Whether its basic constituent elements are atoms, or subatomic particles, or some yet undiscovered forms of energy, [the universe] is not ruled by a consciousness or by will or by chance, but by the law of identity. All the countless forms, motions, combinations and dissolutions of elements within the universe–from a floating speck of dust to the formation of a galaxy to the emergence of life–are caused and determined by the identities of the elements involved.”

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quote icon "If one upholds freedom, one must uphold man’s individual rights ; if one upholds man’s individual rights, one must uphold his right to his own life, to his own liberty, to the pursuit of his own happiness – which means one must uphold a political system which guarantees and protects these rights …”

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quote icon A man does not exist merely in order to earn a living; he earns a living in order to exist. His economic activities are the means to an end; the kind of life he wants to lead, the kind of purpose he wants to achieve with the money he earns determines what work he chooses to do and whether he chooses to work at all.

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quote icon When in doubt about the meaning or the definition of a concept, the best method of clarification is to look for its referents - i.e. to ask oneself: What fact or facts of reality gave rise to this concept? What distinguishes it from all other concepts?

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quote icon A definition is a statement that identifies the nature of the units subsumed under a concept.

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quote icon REASON is the power of the mind to think, understand, and form judgments by a process of logic which is the art of non-contradictory identification.

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quote icon “The law of causality is the law of identity applied to action. All actions are caused by entities. The nature of an action is caused and determined by the nature of the entities that act; a thing cannot act in contradiction to its nature.”

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quote icon “Anarchy, as a political concept, is a naïve floating abstraction … a society without an organized government would be at the mercy of the first criminal who came along and who would precipitate it into chaos of gang warfare.”

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quote icon “A private individual may do anything except that which is legally forbidden; a government official may do nothing except that which is legally permitted.”

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quote icon “In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade the effort. But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival.”

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quote icon In your own profession, in military science, you know the importance of keeping track of the enemy's weapons, strategy and tactics - and of being prepared to counter them. The same is true in philosophy: you have to understand the enemy's ideas and be prepared to refute them, you have to know his basic arguments and be able to blast them.

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quote icon But the principles you accept (consciously or subconsciously) may clash with or contradict one another; they, too, have to be integrated. What integrates them? Philosophy. A philosophic system is an integrated view of existence.

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quote icon “The new theory of justice demands that men counteract the ‘injustice’ of nature by instituting the most obscenely unthinkable injustice among men: deprive ‘those favored by nature’ (i.e., the talented, the intelligent, the creative) of the right to the rewards they produce – and grant to the incompetent, the stupid, the slothful a right to the effortless enjoyment of the rewards they could not produce, could not imagine, and would not know what to do with.”

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quote icon “Collectivism holds that the individual has no rights, that his life and work belong to the group … 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 political corollary of collectivism.”

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quote icon “The absolute state is merely an institutionalized form of gang-rule, regardless of which particular gang seizes power.”

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quote icon Evil...is an absence and a negation, evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort in us.

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quote icon An axiom is a proposition that defeats its opponents by the fact that they have to accept it and use it in the process of any attempt to deny it.

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quote icon “The best way to study philosophy is to approach it as one approaches a detective story: follow every trail, clue and implication, in order to discover who is a murderer and who is a hero.”

Missing Reference

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quote icon Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision.

Missing Reference

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quote icon Modern art is an attempt to disintegrate man’s consciousness and reduce it to a pre-conceptual level; A breaking of concepts into mere sensations. Disintegration is the keynote and goal of modern art. The disintegration of man’s conceptual faculty and the retrogression of an adult mind to the state of an infant. To reduce man’s consciousness to the level of sensation with no capacity to integrate them is the intention behind the reducing of language to grunts, of literature to moods, of painting to smears, of sculpture to slabs, of music to noise.

Missing Reference

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