“Why do they always teach us that it's easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It's the hardest thing in the world--to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want.”
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Ayn Rand 322
Russian-American novelist and philosopher 1905–1982Related quotes

Lies: And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them (2003)
Context: If you listen to a lot of conservatives, they'll tell you that the difference between them and us is that conservatives love America and liberals hate America.... They don't get it. We love America just as much as they do. But in a different way. You see, they love America like a 4-year-old loves his mommy. Liberals love America like grown-ups. To a 4-year-old, everything Mommy does is wonderful and anyone who criticizes Mommy is bad. Grown-up love means actually understanding what you love, taking the good with the bad and helping your loved one grow. Love takes attention and work and is the best thing in the world.
That's why we liberals want America to do the right thing. We know America is the hope of the world, and we love it and want it to do well.

Psychedelic Society (1984)
Context: !-- ~28m57s -->Because too much we have lived in the light of the idea that your ideology will be dictated to you essentially by geography! And if you're born in India, you'll find out that the Cosmos is one way; if you're born in Brooklyn, you find out it's another way. What we need to do is transcend these localized grids of fate, which make us what we are but don't want to be.

2007-11-12
Countdown with Keith Olbermann
MSNBC
Television
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21771581/
explaining to his ombudsman, Laurie Dhue, what to do about mail complaining about the low quality of Fox News Channel material; November 2007
“The purpose of life is not to do what we want but what needs to be done.”
Variant: The purpose of life is not to do what we want but what needs to be done. This is what fate demands of us.
Source: Brisingr

“We do what we have to so we can do what we want to.”
“The world doesn’t give a damn what we feel or want. Only what we are, and what we do.”
Source: Street Lethal (1983), Chapter 17 “Alpha-Alpha” (p. 250)
“Malraux and the Statues at Bamberg”, p. 191
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)

“What I want you to take seriously is what we have to do for the youth.”
1990s, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Atlanta (1992)