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
Aquinas brought an Aristotelian view of reason back into European culture, and lighted the way toward the Renaissance.
You don't build for the way people live, but for the way they should live. I don't write about people as they are, but as they could be and should be.
Whatever road I take, the guiding star is within me; the guiding star and the loadstone which point the way. They point in but one direction. They point to me.
Do you mean to tell me that you're thinking seriously of building that way, when and if you are an architect?" Yes." My dear fellow, who will let you?" That's not the point. The point is, who will stop me?
Aristotle may be regarded as the cultural barometer of Western history. Whenever his influence dominated the scene, it paved the way for one of history's brilliant eras; whenever it fell, so did mankind.
The quickest way to kill the human spirit is to ask someone to do mediocre work.
Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer - and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.
I can accept anything, except what seems to be the easiest for most people: the half-way, the almost, the just-about, the in-between.
Man cannot demand that others give up their lives to make him happy.
I agree that [marriage] should be treated like a business deal. But every business deal has to have its own terms and its own kind of currency.
Namely, if I am challenging the base of all these institutions, I'm challenging the moral code of altruism. The precept that man's moral duty is to live for others. That man must sacrifice himself to others. Which is the present day morality.
Since only an individual man can possess rights, the expression "individual rights"? is a redundancy (which one has to use for purposes of clarification in today's intellectual chaos). But the expression "collective rights"? is a contradiction in terms.
Rationalization is a cover-up, a process of providing one's emotions with a false identity, of giving them spurious explanations and justifications - in order to hide one's motives, not just from others, but primarily from oneself. The price of rationalizing is the hampering, the distortion, and, ultimately, the destruction of one's cognitive faculty. Rationalization is a process not of perceiving reality, but of attempting to make reality fit one's emotions.
A morality that holds need as a claim, holds emptiness-non-existence-as its standard of value; it rewards an absence, a defect: weakness, inability, incompetence, suffering, disease, disaster, the lack, the fault, the flaw-the zero.