Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand
Ayn Randwas a Russian-born American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter. She is known for her two best-selling novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and for developing a philosophical system she called Objectivism. Educated in Russia, she moved to the United States in 1926. She had a play produced on Broadway in 1935–1936. After two early novels that were initially unsuccessful in America, she achieved fame with her 1943 novel, The Fountainhead...
NationalityRussian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth2 February 1905
CitySaint Petersburg, Russia
CountryRussian Federation
I cannot project the degree of hatred required to make those women run around in crusades against abortion. Hatred is what they certainly project, not love for the embryos, which is a piece of nonsense no one could experience, but hatred, a virulent hatred for an unnamed object...Their hatred is directed against human beings as such, against the mind, against reason, against ambition, against success, against love, against any value that brings happiness to human life. In compliance with the dishonesty that dominates today's intellectual field, they call themselves "pro-life".
I worship individuals for their highest possibilities as individuals and I loathe humanity for its failure to live up to these possibilities.
...if men are to be ruled, then the enemy is reason.
The Middle Ages were an era of mysticism, ruled by blind faith and blind obedience to the dogma that faith is superior to reason. The Renaissance was specifically the rebirth of reason, the liberation of man's mind, the triumph of rationality over mysticism - a faltering, incomplete, but impassioned triumph that led to the birth of science, of individualism, of freedom.
We have only two sources of information about the character of the people around us: we judge them by what they do and by what they say (particularly the first).
Defiance, not obedience, is the American's answer to overbearing authority.
Faith and force ... are corollaries: every period of history dominated by mysticism, was a period of statism, of dictatorship, of tyranny.
The essential characteristic of socialism is the denial of individual property rights...
Needless to say, under either system [socialism or fascism], the inequalities of income and standard of living are greater than anything possible under a free economy -- and a man's position is determined, not by his productive ability and achievement, but by political pull and force. Under both systems, sacrifice is invoked as a magic, omnipotent solution in any crisis -- and "the public good" is the altar on which victims are immolated.
...If peace were the goal of today's intellectuals, a failure of that magnitude -- and the evidence of unspeakable suffering on so large a scale -- would make them pause and check their statist premises. Instead, blind to everything but their hatred for capitalism, they are now asserting that 'poverty breeds wars' ... But the question is: What breeds poverty? If you look a the world of today and if you look back at history, you will see the answer: the degree of a country's freedom is the degree of its prosperity.
Don't ever get angry at a man for stating the truth.
I love you so much that nothing can matter to me - not even you...Only my love- not your answer. Not even your indifference
The goal of the 'liberals' - as it emerges from the record of the past decades - was to smuggle this country into welfare statism by means of single, concrete, specific measures, enlarging the power of the government a step at a time, never permitting these steps to be summed up into principles, never permitting their direction to be identified or the basic issue to be named. Thus, statism was to come, not by vote or by violence, but by slow rot - by a long process of evasion and epistemological corruption, leading to a fait accompli.
Tell me what a person finds sexually attractive and I will tell you their entire philosophy of life. Show me the person they sleep with and I will tell you their valuation of themselves.