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Book: The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism
Quotes of Book: The Virtue of Selfishness: A
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  1. Ayn Rand _ The Virtue of Selfishness: A

    The theory that holds "good blood" or "bad blood" as a moral-intellectual criterion , can lead to nothing but torrents of blood in practice.
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  2. Ayn Rand _ The Virtue of Selfishness: A

    What subjectivism is in the realm of ethics, collectivism is in the realm of politics. Just as the notion that "anything I do is right because I chose to do it," is not a moral principle, but a negation of morality--so the notion that "anything society does is right because society chose to do it," is not a moral principle, but a negation of moral principles an the banishment of morality from social issues.
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  3. Ayn Rand _ The Virtue of Selfishness: A

    If life is a process of self-sustaining action, then this is the distinctly human mode of action and survival: to think--to produce--to meet the challenges of existence by a never-ending effort and inventiveness.
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  4. Ayn Rand _ The Virtue of Selfishness: A

    When man discovered how to make fire to keep himself warm, his need of thought and effort was not ended; when he discovered how to fashion a bow and arrow, his need of thought and effort was not ended; when he discovered how to build a shelter out of stone, then out of brick, then out of glass and steel, his need of thought and effort was not ended; when he moved his life expectancy from nineteen to thirty to forty to sixty to seventy, his need of thought and effort was not ended; so long as he lives, his need of thought and effort is never ended.
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  5. Ayn Rand _ The Virtue of Selfishness: A

    Every achievement of man is a value in itself, but it is also a stepping-stone to greater achievements and values. Life is growth; not to move forward, is to fall backward; life remains life, only so long as it advances. Every step upward opens to man a wider range of action and achievement--and creates the need for that action and achievement. There is no final, permanent "plateau". The problem of survival is never "solved", once and for all, with no further thought or motion required. More precisely, the problem of survival is solved, by recognizing that survival demands constant growth and creativeness.
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  6. Ayn Rand _ The Virtue of Selfishness: A

    In spiritual issues--{by "spiritual" I mean: "pertaining to man's consciousness"}--a trader is a man who does not seek to be loved for his weaknesses or flaws, only for his virtues, and who does not grant his love to the weaknesses or the flaws of others, only to their virtues.
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  7. Ayn Rand _ The Virtue of Selfishness: A

    There is no such thing as "the right to enslave".A nation can do it , just as a man can become a criminal - but neither can do it by right. It doesn't matter in this context, whether a nation was enslaved by force {like soviet Russia}, or by vote {like Nazi Germany}.
    book-quoterightsenslave

  8. Ayn Rand _ The Virtue of Selfishness: A

    Ethics is not a mystic fantasy--nor a social convention--nor a dispensable, subjective luxury...Ethics is an objective necessity of man's survival--not by the grace of the supernatural nor of your neighbors nor of your whims, but the grace of reality and the nature of life."
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  9. Ayn Rand _ The Virtue of Selfishness: A

    A right doesn't include the material implementation of that right by other men;it includes only the freedom to earn that implementation by one's own effort.
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  10. Ayn Rand _ The Virtue of Selfishness: A

    A man who seeks escape from the responsibility of supporting his life by his own thought and effort, and wishes to survive by conquering, ruling and exploiting others, is NOT an Individualist.
    book-quotesurvive

  11. Ayn Rand _ The Virtue of Selfishness: A

    Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions.
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  12. Ayn Rand _ The Virtue of Selfishness: A

    Rationality is man's basic virtue, the source of all his other virtues. Man's basic vice, the source of all evils, is the act of unfocussing his mind, the suspension of his conciousness, which is not blindness, but the refusal to see, not ignorance, but the refusal to know. Irrationality is the rejection of man's means of survival and therefore, a commitment to a course of blind destruction; that is anti-mind, anti-life.
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