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Author's popularity: -1
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Popularity: -1
Vote: | A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | A desire presupposes the possibility of action to achieve it; action presupposes a goal which is worth achieving. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | A government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Do not ever say that the desire to "do good" by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics - a rational ethics - as a precondition of rebirth. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Evil requires the sanction of the victim. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | God... a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Government "help" to business is just as disastrous as government persecution... the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | He had a big head and a face so ugly it became almost fascinating. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | He liked to observe emotions; they were like red lanterns strung along the dark unknown of another's personality, marking vulnerable points. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | I don't build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose... the fact that they were the people who created the phrase "to make money." No other language or nation had ever used these words before... Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual). |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | It only stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Just as man can't exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one's rights into reality, to think, to work and keep the results, which means: the right of property. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Man is a being with free will; therefore, each man is potentially good or evil, and it's up to him and only him (through his reasoning mind) to decide which he wants to be. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth, the man who would make his fortune no matter where he started. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of all money? |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | The ladder of success is best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. |
Popularity: 7
Vote: | The worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | There can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions to an individual, but permitted to a mob. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | They proclaim that every man is entitled to exist without labor and, the laws of reality to the contrary notwithstanding, is entitled to receive his "minimum sustenance" his food, his clothes, his shelter, with no effort on his part, as his due and his birthright. To receive it, from whom? |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | To achieve, you need thought. You have to know what you are doing and that's real power. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | To say "I love you" one must first be able to say the "I." |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | What is a demanding pleasure that demands the use of ones mind! Not in the sense of problem solving, but in the sense of exercising discrimination, judgment, awareness. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is learning to understand and control the behavior of crop plants and domestic animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized. |
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Biography
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Ayn Rand (February 2, 1905 – March 6, 1982; first name pronounced (IPA) (rhymes with 'mine')), born Alissa "Alice" Zinovievna Rosenbaum, was a popular and controversial American philosopher and novelist, best known for her philosophy of Objectivism and her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Her philosophy and her fiction both emphasize, above all, her concepts of individualism, egoism, "Objectivist philosophy#Ethics: rational self-interest|rational self-interest", and capitalism. Her novels were based upon the archetype of the Randian hero, a man whose ability and independence leads others to reject him, but who perseveres nevertheless to achieve his values. Rand viewed this hero as the ideal and made it the express goal of her literature to showcase such heroes. She believed:
#That man must choose his values and actions by reason;
#That the individual has a right to exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing self to others nor others to self; and
#That no one has the right to seek values from others by physical force, or impose ideas on others by physical force.
Biography
Early life
Rand was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and was the eldest of three daughters of a Jewish family. She studied philosophy and history at the University of Petrograd. There she took classes with the political theorist Professor Losky, and it was at this time that she first became attracted to Nietzschean views. She then entered the State Institute for Cinema Arts in 1924 to study screenwriting; in late 1925, however, she was granted a visa to visit American relatives. She arrived in the United States in February 1926, at the age of twenty-one. After a brief stay with her relatives in Chicago, she resolved never to return to the Soviet Union, and set out for Los Angeles to become a screenwriter. She then changed her name to "Ayn Rand", partly to avoid Soviet retaliation against her family for her political views (she assumed her name would appear in the credits of films with an anti-Communist message, attracting the attention of Soviet officials). There is a story told that she named herself after the Remington Rand typewriter, but recent evidence has proved that this is not the case. (http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=about_ayn_rand_faq_index2#ar_q3b) In Barbara Branden's The Passion of Ayn Rand, Ayn Rand's first name is said to have come from the name of a Finnish writer whom she had not read, but whose name she liked and adopted. The book also has a quotation from Ayn's cousin in which she claims to have been present when Ayn chose the name Rand from a typewriter.
Major works
Initially, Rand struggled in Hollywood and took odd jobs to pay her basic living-expenses. While working as an extra on Cecil B. DeMille's King of Kings, she intentionally bumped into an aspiring young actor, Frank O'Connor, who caught her eye. The two were married in 1929. In 1931, Rand became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Her first literary success came with the sale of her screenplay Red Pawn in 1932 to Universal Studios. Rand then wrote the play, The Night of January 16th in 1934 and published two novels, We The Living (1936), and Anthem (1938).
Without Rand's permission, We The Living was made into a pair of films, Noi vivi and Addio, Kira in 1942 by Scalara Films, Rome, despite resistance from the Italian government under Benito Mussolini. These films were re-edited into a new version which was approved by Rand and re-released as We the Living in 1986.
Rand's first major professional success came with her best-selling novel The Fountainhead (1943). The novel was rejected by many publishers before finally being accepted by the Bobbs-Merrill Company publishing house. Despite these initial struggles The Fountainhead was successful, bringing Rand fame and financial security.
Rand published the book described as her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, in 1957. This book, just as The Fountainhead had, became a bestseller. Atlas Shrugged is often seen as Rand's most complete statement of Objectivist philosophy in any of her works of fiction. Along with Nathaniel Branden and his wife Barbara, as well as a handful of others including Alan Greenspan and Leonard Peikoff (jokingly designated "The Collective"), Rand launched the Objectivist movement to promote her philosophy.
Politics and House Committee on Un-American Activities testimony
Rand's political views were radically anti-communist, anti-statist, and pro-capitalist. Her writings praised above all the human individual and the creative genius of which one is capable. She exalted what she saw as the heroic American values of egoism and individualism. Rand also had a strong dislike for mysticism, religion, and compulsory charity, all of which she believed helped foster a crippling culture of resentment towards individual human happiness, flourishment, and success.
In 1947, during the infamous Red Scare, Rand testified as a "friendly witness" before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. (http://www.noblesoul.com/orc/texts/huac.html). Rand's testimony involved analysis of the 1943 film Song of Russia. Rand argued that the movie grossly misrepresented the socioeconomic conditions in the Soviet Union. She told the committee that the film presented life in the USSR as being much better than it actually was. Apparently this 1943 film was intentional wartime propaganda by U.S. patriots, trying to put their Soviet allies in World War II under the best possible light. After the HUAC hearings, when Ayn Rand was asked about her feelings on the effectiveness of their investigations, she described the process as "futile."
The Objectivist movement
Main article: The Objectivist movement
In 1950 Rand moved to New York City, where in 1951 she met the young psychology student Nathaniel Branden (http://www.nathanielbranden.com), who had read her book The Fountainhead at the age of 14. Branden, then 19, enjoyed discussing Rand's emerging Objectivist philosophy with her. Together, Branden and some of his other friends formed a group that they dubbed the Ayn Rand Collective. After several years, Rand and Branden's friendly relationship blossomed into a romantic affair despite the fact that both were married at the time. This affair was cleared with their spouses but led to the separation and then divorce of Nathaniel Branden from his wife.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Rand developed and promoted her Objectivist philosophy through both her fiction (http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=objectivism_fiction) and non-fiction (http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=objectivism_nonfiction) works, and by giving talks at several east-coast universities, largely through the Nathaniel Branden Institute ("the NBI") which Branden had established to promote her philosophy.
After a convoluted series of separations and additional affairs, Rand abruptly ended her relationship with both Nathaniel Branden and his wife Barbara Branden in 1968 when she learned of Nathaniel Branden's affair with Patrecia Scott (this later affair did not overlap chronologically with the earlier Branden/Rand affair). Rand refused to have any further dealings with the NBI. Rand then published a letter in "The Objectivist" announcing her repudiation of Branden for various reasons, including dishonesty, but did not mention their affair or her role in the schism. The two never reconciled, and Branden remained a persona non grata in the Objectivist movement.
Conflicts continued in the wake of the break with Branden and the subsequent collapse of the NBI. Many of her closest "Collective" friends began to part ways, and during the late 70's her activities within the formal Objectivist movement began to decline, a situation which increased after the death of her husband in 1979. One of her final projects was work on a television adaptation of Atlas Shrugged.
Rand died of heart failure on March 6, 1982 and was interred in the Kensico Cemetery, Valhalla, New York.
Philosophical influences
Rand rejected virtually all other philosophical schools. She acknowledged an intellectual debt to Aristotle and occasionally remarked with approval on specific philosophical positions of, e.g., Baruch Spinoza and Thomas Aquinas. She seems also to have respected the American rationalist Brand Blanshard. However, she regarded most philosophers as at best incompetent and at worst positively evil. She singled out Immanuel Kant as the most influential of the latter sort, but today many of her followers acknowledge some individualist Kantian concepts could be misunderstood by her.
Nonetheless, there are connections between Rand's views and those of other philosophers. She acknowledged that she had been influenced at an early age by the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. Though she later repudiated his thought, and reprinted her early novels with revisions in 1959, her own thought grew out of critical interaction with it. It has been suggested that she was also influenced by dialectical thinkers such as Karl Marx in this way. Strong similarities can be detected between her ethical views and the doctrines of Epicurus and the Stoics, and between her views on government and those of John Locke. More generally, her political thought can be seen as fitting in the tradition of classical liberalism that includes William Graham Sumner, Herbert Spencer, Albert Jay Nock, Isabel Paterson, and Rose Wilder Lane. She expressed qualified enthusiasm for the economic thought of Ludwig von Mises and Henry Hazlitt.
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Ayn Rand".
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