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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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"Two things influence one's wisdom: remarkable experience and " evenmuch more " accumulated knowledge."

"Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills over. There is a brown pool on the table-it is running among your books and papers. Now you mop it up, clumsily, with your pocket-hankerchief. You then stuff your hankerchief back into your pocket-that is not Byron; that is so essentially you that if I think of you in twenty years' time, when we are both famous, gouty and intolerable, it will be by that scene: and if you are dead, I shall weep."

"There is no saint here. I have attained wisdom from life's experiences... the positive, the negative, the destructive, the nourishing. I have been medicine and I have been poison. I've learned a lot about heaven from aligning with angels and I learned a lot about hell from acting like a devil. I offer my scars... what you call "wisdom"... as insight I have gathered from my comfort of living within both the light and the shadow."

"You will never attain wisdom without walking on different streets, without talking to different people, without reading different books, in short, without meeting with the things different in every aspect!"
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"The power of the sky can be made to do men's bidding. There are no limits to its secrets and its might, and it can be made to grant us anything if we but choose to ask."

"Were she lying crushed under the ruins of a building, were she torn by the bomb of an air raid, so long as she was still in existence she would know that action is man's foremost obligation, regardless of anything he feels."

"She wanted to tell him of the years she had spent looking for men such as he to work with; she wanted to tell him that his enemies were hers, that she was fighting the same battle..."

"It was as if a volcano were cracking open, yet the people at the foot of the mountain ignored the sudden fissures, the black fumes, the boiling trickles, and went on believing that their only danger was to acknowledge the reality of these signs."

"Through all the ages the mind has been regarded as evil, and every form of insult: from heretic to materialist to exploiter-every form of iniquity: from exile to disfranchisement to expropriation-every form of torture: from sneers to rack to firing squad-have been brought down upon those who assumed the responsibility of looking at the world through the eyes of a living consciousness and performing the crucial act of a rational connection. Yet only to the extent to which-in chains, in dungeons, in hidden corners, in the cells of philosophers, in the shops of traders-some men continued to think, only to that extent was humanity able to survive."

"Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life. Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself."

"To irrational principles, one cannot be loyal. Ideas that are not derived from reality cannot be consistently practiced in reality.-as quoted by Leonard Peikoff in "Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand."

"I win by means of nothing but logic and I surrender to nothing but logic. I do not surrender my reason or deal with men who surrender theirs."
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