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"Listen to what is being preached today. Look at everyone around us. You've wondered why they suffer, why they seek happiness and never find it. If any man stopped and asked himself whether he's ever held a truly personal desire, he'd find the answer. He'd see that all his wishes, his efforts, his dreams, his ambitions are motivated by other men. He's not really struggling even for material wealth, but for the second-hander's delusion - prestige. A stamp of approval, not his own. He can find no joy in the struggle and no joy when he has succeeded. He can't say about a single thing: 'This is what I wanted because I wanted it, not because it made my neighbors gape at me'. Then he wonders why he's unhappy."
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"Solitude is a wonderful treasure the world is still yet to discover."

"We must stop calling bribes in our higher institutions "helping my child to gain admission."

"You are created to reflect heaven on earth."

"I see that the culture that is prevalent right now in Nigeria and indeed Africa is the culture of GET RICH QUICK."

"Solitude allows you to be able to arrange your life only around your destiny."

"If you don't monitor your life, you will regret it. If you don't measure your life, you will regret it."

"Always ask yourself what you have achieved within a given time and the product of your life."

"We need to analyze our picture of the world."

"Neglect is a major reason for some of the most painful experiences we suffer in life."

"Reconsider your life and see how you can make things work for yourself."
Explore more quotes by Ayn Rand

"Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice."

"And she thought, with a vicious thrill, of what these people would do if they read her mind in this moment; if they knew that she was thinking of a man in a quarry, thinking of his body with a sharp intimacy as one does not think of another's body but only of one's own. She smiled; the cold purity of her face prevented them from seeing the nature of that smile."

"My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose."

"When the train stopped, when she got off and heard the concrete of the platform under her heels, she felt light, lifted, impelled to action. She started off, walking fast, as if the speed of her steps could give form to the things she felt."

"Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality. But existence exists; reality is not to be wiped out, it will merely wipe out the wiper. By refusing to say 'It is,' you are refusing to say 'I am.' By suspending your judgment, you are negating your person. When a man declares: 'Who am I to know?'- he is declaring: 'Who am I to live?"

"From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man-the function of his reasoning mind."

"People said it because other people said it. They did not know why it was being said and heard everywhere. They did not give or ask for reasons. 'Reason,' Dr. Pritchett had told them, 'is the most naive of all superstitions.' 'The source of public opinion?' said Claude Slagenhop in a public radio speech. 'There is no source of public opinion. It is spontaneously general. It is a reflex of the collective instinct of the collective mind."

"There is no escape from justice, nothing can be unearned and unpaid for in the universe, neither in matter nor in spirit-and if the guilty do not pay, then the innocent have to pay it."

"I can accept anything, except what seems to be the easiest for most people: the half-way, the almost, the just-about, the in-between."
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