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Altruism
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We are here on earth to do good to others.
What the others are here for, I don't know.
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-W.H. Auden
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*Do you call the fact that
my book benefited readers "altruistic"? Do you mean that they deprived from
it greater benefits than I did, spiritual or material? Do you mean that their
benefit was achieved at the expense of mine or at the price of some sort of
self-sacrifice by me? Do you mean that I wrote it for their sake, not mine?
Do you mean that I wrote it for the purpose of benefiting them, with no
personal interest involved in the matter? or do you mean that in order to be
selfish, I had to expect my book to harm people---but since it didn't,
this makes me an altruist?
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-Ayn Rand
Private correspondence to Robert Spencer Carr (science fiction author),
January 23,1949
Letters of Ayn Rand, 1995
Chapter 6, "The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged Years (1945-1959)"
Michael S. Berliner, ed.
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