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| Ayn Rand
A "whim" is a desire experienced by a person who does not know and does not care to discover its cause. A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom. A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.A desire presupposes the possibility of action to achieve it; action presupposes a goal which is worth achieving. A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race - and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin.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. A gun is not an argument.A house can have integrity, just like a person.A leash is only a rope with a noose on both ends.A sin [original sin] without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If a man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold, as man's sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality. To hold man's nature as his sin is a mockery of nature. To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason. 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.Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.All the reasons which made the initiation of physical force evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative. -All work is an act of philosophyAmerica's abundance was not created by public sacrifices to the common good, but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. An inventor is a man who asks 'Why?' of the universe and lets nothing stand between the answer and his mind. -And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride. This god, this one word: "I." Anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today.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. -Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature. But what is freedom? Freedom from what? There is nothing to take man's
freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free
of his brothers.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. -Civilization is the process of setting man free from men. Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy.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. Competition is a by-product of productive work, not its goal. A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong. Contrary to the ecologists, nature does not stand still and does not maintain the kind of equilibrium that guarantees the survival of any particular species - least of all the survival of her greatest and most fragile product: man.Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration. -Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owner a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Do not ever say that the desire to do good by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives. Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind, and a step that travels unlimited roads.Don't work for my happiness, my brothers --show me yours --show me that it is possible --show me your achievement --and the knowledge will give me courage for mine.Epistemology is a science devoted to the discovery of the proper methods of acquiring and validating knowledge.Every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics -- a rational ethics -- as a precondition of rebirth.Every coercive monopoly was created by government intervention into the economy: by special privileges, such as franchises or subsidies, which closed the entry of competitors into a given field, by legislative action. -Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others. -Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive.Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice.Every man is free to rise as far as he's able or willing, but the degree to which he thinks determines the degree to which he'll rise.Everything to which you grant your love is yours.Existence exists and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists. -Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins. God... a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive. 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. Guilt is a rope that wears thin. Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values. He had a big head and a face so ugly it became almost fascinating.Honor is self-esteem made visible in action.Howard Roark laughed. He stood naked at the edge of a cliff... {opening line from 'The Fountainhead'} I am a man who does not exist for others.I am neither friend nor foe to my brothers, but as such as he shall deserve of me. I do not grant my love freely, nor to any chance passer-by who may wish to claim it. I honor men with my love, but honor is a thing to be earned.I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows.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.I don't build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.I guard my treasures: my thought, my will, my freedom. And the greatest of these is freedom.I have come here to say that I do not recognize anyone's right to one minute of my life....It had to be said. The world is perishishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.I made my fortune by being able to spot a certain kind of man. I mean that groups of men are vacuums. Great big empty
nothings. They say we can't visualize a total nothing. Hell,
sit at any committee meeting. The point is only who chooses
to fill that nothing.I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.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.I'm working to improve my methods, and every hour I save is an hour added to my life. If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.If devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.If there is any one proof of a man's incompetence, it is the stagnant mentality of a worker who, doing some small routine job in a vast undertaking, does not care to look beyond the lever of a machine, does not choose to know how the machine got there or what makes his job possible, and proclaims that the management of the undertaking is parasitical and unneccessary.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. In a capitalist society, all human relationships are voluntary. Men are free to cooperate or not, to deal with one another or not, as their own individual judgments, convictions and interests dictate. -In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. -In psychology, one school holds that man, by nature, is a helpless,
guilt-ridden, instinct-driven automation -- while another school
objects that this is not true, because there is no scientific evidence
to prove that man is conscious.In the temple of his spirit, each man is alone.Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries. -It is a sin to write this.It is futile to fight against, if one does not know what one is fighting for. -It is the metaphysically given that must be accepted: it cannot be changed. It is the man-made that must never be accepted uncritically: it must be judged, then accepted or rejected and changed when necessary. 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.Learn to distinguish the difference between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality.Love is an expression and assertion of self-esteem, a response to one's own values in the person of another. One gains a profoundly personal, selfish joy from the mere existence of the person one loves. It is one's own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns, and derives from love.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.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. Man's character is the product of his premises.Mediocrity doesn't mean average intelligence, it means an average intelligence that resents and envies its betters.Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason. Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute. -No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the sum of his knowledge.No one's happiness but my own is in my power to achieve or to destroy. One can not be a traitor to anything, except to oneself. -One's own independent judgment is the means by which one must choose one's actions, but it is not a moral criterion nor a moral validation; only reference to a demonstrable principle can validate one's choices. 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.Petrograd smelt of carbolic acid.Philosophy studies the fundamental nature of existence, of man, and of man's relationship to existence. ? In the realm of cognition, the special sciences are the trees, but philosophy is the soil which makes the forest possible. -Pity for the guilty is treason to the innocent.Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lot of an empty mind.Rationality is man's basic virtue, the source of all his other virtues... The virtue of Rationality means the recognition and acceptance of reason as one`s only source of knowledge, one`s only judge of values and one's only guide to action.Reason and morality are the only weapons that determine the course of history; the collectivists dropped them because they had no right to carry them. Pick them up; you have. -Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone.Rights are moral principles which define and protect a man's freedom of action,but impose no obligation on other men. -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.She could not have reached this white serenity except as the sum of all the colors, of all the violence she had known.Since time immemorial and pre-industrial, 'greed' has been the accusation hurled at the rich by the concrete-bound illiterates who were unable to conceive of the source of wealth or of the motivation of those who produce it. So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate the use of physical force against others....When a man attempts to deal with me by force, I answer him—by force. It is only as retaliation that force may be used and only against the man who starts its use. No, I do not share his evil or sink to his concept of morality: I merely grant him his choice, destruction, the only destruction he had the right to choose: his own.So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of all money?Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and i will you his entire philosophy of life.Thanksgiving is a typically American holiday...The lavish meal is a symbol of the fact that abundant consumption is the result and reward of production. The action required to sustain human life is primarily intellectual: everything man needs has to be discovered by his mind and produced by his effort.The Argument from Intimidation is a confession of intellectual impotence. The desire not to be anything is the desire not to be. The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it.The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see. The idea that 'the public interest' supersedes private interests and rights can have but one meaning: that the interests and rights of some individuals take precedence over the interests and rights of others. The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap. The men who are not interested in philosophy need it most urgently; they are most helplessly in its power. The moral cannibalism of all hedonist and altruist doctrines lies in the premise that the happiness of one man necessitates the injury of another.The moral precept to adopt...is: Judge, and be prepared to be judged. -The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the
young know everything.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. The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence....The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, and to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law. The only purpose of education is to teach a student how to live his life-by developing his mind and equipping him to deal with reality. The training he needs is theoretical, i.e., conceptual. He has to be taught to think, to understand, to integrate, to prove. He has to be taught the essentials of the knowledge discovered in the past-and he has to be equipped to acquire further knowledge by his own effort.The precept: Judge not, that ye be not judged ... is an abdication of moral responsibility: it is a moral blank check one gives to others in exchange for a moral blank check one expects for oneself.The purpose of all art is the objectification of values.The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.The purpose of the law is not to prevent a future offense, but to punish the one actually committed.The right to agree with others is not a problem in any society; it is the right to disagree that is crucial. It is the institution of private property that protects and implements the right to disagree...The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles. The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow.The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life.The worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt.There are no absolutes, they chatter, blanking out the fact that they are uttering an absolute.There are only two means by which men can deal with one another: guns or logic. Force or persuasion. Those who know that they cannot win by means of logic, have always resorted to guns.There are two kinds of teachers of the Morality of Death: the mystics of spirit and the mystics of muscle...those who believe in consciousness without existence and those who believe in existence without consciousness....No matter how loudly they posture in the roles of irreconcilable antagonists, their moral codes are alike, and so are their aims: in matter—the enslavement of man's body, in spirit—the destruction of his mind....make no mistake about the character of the mystics. To undercut your consciousness has always been their only purpose throughout the ages—and power, the power to rule you by force, has always been their only lust....But it cannot be done to you without your consent. If you permit it to be done, you deserve it.There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. There can be no compromise on basic principles. There can be no compromise on moral issues. There can be no compromise on matters of knowledge, of truth, of rational conviction.There can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions to an individual, but permitted to a mob. There has never been a philosophy, a theory or a doctrine, that attacked (or 'limited') reason, which did not preach submission to the power of some authority.There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist. There is nothing to take a man's freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers.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?Thinking men cannot be ruled.Thought does not bow to authority.Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. To achieve, you need thought. You have to know what you are doing and that's real power.To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one's thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one's mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.To deal with men by force is as impractical as to deal with nature by persuasion.To discuss evil in a manner implying neutrality, is to sanction it.To fear to face an issue is to believe the worst is true.To interpose the threat of physical destruction between a man and his perception of reality, is to negate and paralyze his means of survival; to force him to act against his own judgment, is like forcing him to act against his own sight.To know one's own desires, their meaning and their costs requires the highest human virtue: rationality.To preserve one's mind intact through a modern college education is a test of courage and endurance, but the battle is worth it and the stakes are the highest possible to man: the survival of reason. {from "The Comprachicos"} To rest one's case on faith means to concede that reason is on the side of one's enemies - that one has no rational arguments to offer.Today, racism is regarded as a crime if practiced by a majority -- but as an inalienable right if practiced by a minority. The notion that one's culture is superior to all others solely because it represents the traditions of one's ancestors, is regarded as chauvinism if claimed by a majority -- but as 'ethnic' pride if claimed by a minority. Resistance to change and progress is regarded as reactionary if demonstrated by a majority -- but retrogression to a Balkan village, to an Indian teepee or to the jungle is hailed if demonstrated by a minority.Under a proper social system, a private individual is legally free to take any action he pleases (so long as he does not violate the rights of others), while a government official is bound by law in his every official act. A private individual may do anything except that which is legally forbidden; a government official may do nothing except that which is legally permitted."Under the politics of altruism the sole recourse of the citizens is to
gang up on one another and maneuver for who'll get sacrificed to whom.Unjust laws have to be fought ideologically; they cannot be fought or corrected by means of mere disobedience and futile martyrdom.Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future. We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality.We cannot fight against anything, unless we fight for something -- and what we must fight for is the supremacy of reason, and a view of man as a rational being. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think.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. What they have to discover, what all the efforts of capitalism's enemies are frantically aimed at hiding, is the fact that capitalism is not merely the 'practical,' but the only moral system in history.When I die, I hope to go to Heaven, whatever the Hell that is.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. When I say capitalism, I mean a full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez faire capitalism, with a separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church. -When personal judgement is inoperative (or forbidden), men's first concern is not how to choose, but how to justify their choice. -When you clamor for public ownership of the means of production, you are clamoring for public ownership of the mind.Whether you know the shape of a pebble or the structure of a solar system, the axioms remain the same: that it exists and that you know it. Who is John Galt?Why is it immoral for you to desire, but moral for others to do so? Why is it immoral to produce a value and keep it, but moral to give it away? And if it is not moral for you to keep a value, why is it moral for others to accept it? If you are selfless and virtuous when you give it, are they not selfish and vicious when they take it? Words are a lens to focus one’s mind. |
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