Ayn Rand (1905 – 1982)
Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter.
In the temple of his spirit, each man is alone.
Don’t allow man to be happy. Happiness is self contained and self-sufficient. Happy men have no time and no use for you. Happy men are free men. So kill their joy of living. Take away from them whatever is dear or important to them. Never let them have what they want [….]Unhappy men will come to you. They’ll need you. They’ll come to you for consolation, for support, for escape. Nature allows no vacuum. Empty man’s soul-and the space is yours to fill.
Neither am I the means to any end others may wish to accomplish. I am not a tool for their use. I am not a servant of their needs. I am not a bandage for their wounds, I am not a sacrifice on their altars.
The creators were not selfless. It is the whole secret of their power-that it was self-sufficient, self-motivated, self-generated. A first cause, a fount of energy, a life force, a Prime Mover. The creator served nothing and no one. He lived for himself.
The men who attempt to survive, not by means of reason, but by means of force, are attempting to survive by the method of animals.
Remember also that the smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
Hands do perspire when held too long. - Ellsworth Toohey
The right to vote is a consequence, not a primary cause, of a free social system—and its value depends on the constitutional structure implementing and strictly delimiting the voters' power; unlimited majority rule is an instance of the principle of tyranny.
I have to say I found Ayn Rand’s philosophy laughable. It was "a white supremacist dreams of the master race," burnt in an early-20th century form. Her ideas didn’t really appeal to me, but they seemed to be the kind of ideas that people would espouse, people who might secretly believe themselves to be part of the elite, and not part of the excluded majority.
The hippies are the living demonstration of what it means to give up reason, and to rely on one's primeval instincts, urges, intuitions, and whims. With such tools, they are unable to grasp even what is needed to satisfy their wishes; for example, the wish to have a festival. Where would they be without the charity of the local "squares" who fed them? Where would they be without the fifty doctors rushed from New York to save their lives? Without the automobiles that brought them to the festival? Without the soda pop and beer they substituted for water? Without the helicopters that brought the entertainers? Without all the achievements of the technological civilization they denounce? Left to their own devices, they literally didn't know enough to come in out of the rain.
Is there any doubt that drug addiction is an escape from an unbearable inner state - from a reality that one cannot deal with - from an atrophying mind one can never fully destroy? If Apollonian reason were unnatural to man, and Dionysian intuition brought him closer to nature and truth, the apostles of irrationality would not have to resort to drugs. Happy, self-confident men do not seek to get stoned. Drug addiction is the attempt to obliterate one's consciousness, the quest for a deliberately-induced insanity. As such, it is so obscene and evil that any doubt about the moral character of its practitioners is itself an obscenity.
Anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today.
Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
It is not advisable, James, to venture unsolicited opinions. You should spare yourself the embarrassing discovery of their exact value to your listener.
What is greatness? I will answer: it is the capacity to live by the three fundamental values of John Galt: reason, purpose, self-esteem.
Ask yourself why totalitarian dictatorships find it necessary to pour money and effort into propaganda for their own helpless, chained, gagged slaves, who have no means of protest or defense. The answer is that even the humblest peasant or the lowest savage would rise in blind rebellion, were he to realize that he is being immolated, not to some incomprehensible noble purpose, but to plain, naked human evil.
An Asian peasant who labors through all of his waking hours, with tools created in Biblical times—a South American aborigine who is devoured by piranha in a jungle stream—an African who is bitten by the tsetse fly—an Arab whose teeth are green with decay in his mouth—these do live with their 'natural environment,' but are scarcely able to appreciate its beauty. Try to tell a Chinese mother, whose child is dying of cholera: 'Should one do everything one can? Of course not.' Try to tell a Russian housewife, who trudges miles on foot in sub-zero weather in order to spend hours standing in line at a state store dispensing food rations, that America is defiled by shopping centers, expressways and family cars.
A desire presupposes the possibility of action to achieve it; action presupposes a goal which is worth achieving.
The mind is the attribute of man. When man is born, he comes into existence with only one weapon with him- The reasoning mind.
By the same principle, the government may not give special leniency to the perpetrator of a crime, on the grounds of the nature of his ideas.