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Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand Quotes

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Famous Ayn Rand Quotes

“We cannot fight against collectivism, unless we fight against its moral base: altruism. We cannot fight against altruism, unless we fight against its epistemological base: irrationalism. We cannot fight against anything, unless we fight for something--and what we must fight for is the supremacy of reason and a view of man as a rational being.”

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Book:Philosophy: Who Needs It
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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.”

WorldI CanCountryStatesAmericaPoliticalUnitedMoralPrinciplesUnited StatesRootsOriginalsPatrioticEthicalUnited States Of AmericaMetaphysicalFoundingWorld History
Book:The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z
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“You'll come back, because yours is an error of knowledge, not a moral failure, not an act of surrender to evil, but only the last act of being victim to your own virtue. We'll wait for you and when you come back, you will have discovered that there need never be any conflict among your desires, nor so tragic a clash of values as the one you've borne so well.”

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Author:Ayn Rand
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“Indiscriminate tolerance and indiscriminate condemnation are not two opposites: they are two variants of the same evasion. To declare that “everybody is white” or “everybody is black” or “everybody is neither white nor black, but gray,” is not a moral judgment, but an escape from the responsibility of moral judgment.”

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Book:The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z
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“[Altruism] is a moral system which holds that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the sole justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, value and virtue. This is the moral base of collectivism, of all dictatorships.”

MenSelfValuesExistenceMoralVirtueSacrificeDutyHighestSakeIndividualismSoleJustificationDictatorshipAltruismService To OthersSelf SacrificeCollectivismMoral Duty
Author:Ayn Rand
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“Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage-the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterologic al traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry.”

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Book:The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution
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“Abortion is a moral right-which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved; morally, nothing other than her wish in the matter is to be considered. Who can conceivably have the right to dictate to her what disposition she is to make of the functions of her body?”

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Book:The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought
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“Hence the sterile, uninspiring futility of a great many theoretical discussions of ethics, and the resentment which many people feel towards such discussions: moral principles remain in their minds as floating abstractions, offering them a goal they cannot grasp and demanding that they reshape their souls in its image, thus leaving them with a burden of undefinable moral guilt.”

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Author:Ayn Rand
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