Quotes from Leonard Peikoff

What one needs to know in order to appraise a man morally is not: what did his mother say or do when he was three? The proper question is: what does he say and do now?

Induction means really the process of coming to conclusions on the basis of observation. Deduction is the process of coming to conclusions on the basis of earlier abstractions.

The worker," said August Bebel (a revered prewar party leader), "has little interest in a state in which political liberty is merely the goal. . . . What good is mere political liberty to him if he is hungry?

When you get up in front of a group of people, you make a contract with them; you promise them, "I am going to deliver value X." Every once in a while, you have to say, "See, I remember; I am keeping my promise.

Egoists hold that a man's primary moral obligation is to achieve his own welfare (egoists do not necessarily agree on the nature of man's welfare).

If men uphold reason, they will be led, ultimately, to conclude that men should deal with one another as free agents, settling their disputes by an appeal to the mind, i.e., by a process of voluntary, rational persuasion. If men reject reason, they will be led, ultimately, to conclude the opposite: that men have no way to deal with one another at all—no way except physical force, wielded by an elite endowed with an allegedly superior, mystic means of cognition.

The pre-Greek civilizations, never discovering the field of epistemology, had no explicit idea of a cognitive process which is systematic, secular, observation-based, logic-ruled; the medievals for centuries had no access to most of this knowledge. The dominant, mystical ideas of such cultures represent a nonrational approach to the world, not an antirational approach.

The defenders of capitalism spent their time broadcasting the vibrations of guilt and futility. Implicitly or explicitly, they were telling the country: human intelligence is impotent to control the course of society, men are helpless in the face of their own motivation, laissez-faire appeals to the evil in men, but men are stuck with it.

The Germans, therefore, practiced them. In order not to be eaten alive by the next round of legislation, virtually everyone joined or identified himself with a group (since an isolated individual had no chance against large, vocal blocs). And every group knew only one policy: to demand new economic benefits from the government and/or new legislative sanctions against the other groups.

In a primacy-of-consciousness philosophy, virtue consists of allegiance to the ruling consciousness, such as God or society. In Ayn Rand's philosophy, virtue consists of allegiance to existence; it consists of a man's recognizing facts and then acting accordingly.

The Nazi] death camps," notes a writer in The New York Times, "were conceived, built and often administered by Ph.D.'s."10 What had those Ph.D.'s been taught to think in their schools and universities—and where did such ideas come from?

The voters were aware of the Nazi ideology. Nazi literature, including statements of the Nazi plans for the future, papered the country during the last years of the Weimar Republic. Mein Kampf alone sold more than 200,000 copies between 1925 and 1932. The essence of the political system which Hitler intended to establish in Germany was clear.

Nazism in politics was a form of statism. In principle, it did not represent a new approach to government; it was a continuation of the political absolutism—the absolute monarchies, the oligarchies, the theocracies, the random tyrannies—which has characterized most of human history.

In degree, however, the total state does differ from its predecessors: it represents statism pressed to its limits, in theory and in practice, devouring the last remnants of the individual.

The goal of the Progressive indoctrinators was not to impose a specific system of ideas on the student, but to destroy his capacity to hold any firm ideas, on any subject.

Science, indeed, is nothing more than the conceptual unravelling of sensory data; it has no other primary evidence from which to proceed.

Collectivism is the theory that the group (the collective) has primacy over the individual. Collectivism holds that, in human affairs, the collective—society, the community, the nation, the proletariat, the race, etc.—is the unit of reality and the standard of value.

Racial subjectivism holds that a man's inborn racial constitution determines his mental processes, his intellectual outlook, his thought patterns, his feelings, his conclusions—and that these conclusions, however well established, are valid only for members of a given race, who share the same underlying constitution.

Religious writers often claim that the cause of Nazism is the secularism or the scientific spirit of the modern world. This evades the facts that the Germans at the time, especially in Prussia, were one of the most religious peoples in Western Europe; that the Weimar Republic was a hotbed of mystic cults, of which Nazism was one; and that Germany's largest and most devout religious group, the Lutherans, counted themselves among Hitler's staunchest followers.

We dare not brush aside unexplained a horror such as Nazism. If we are to avoid a fate like that of Germany, we must find out what made such a fate possible. We must find out what, at root, is required to turn a country, Germany or any other, into a Nazi dictatorship; and then we must uproot that root. We

No weird cultural aberration produced Nazism. No intellectual lunatic fringe miraculously overwhelmed a civilized country. It is modern philosophy—not some peripheral aspect of it, but the most central of its mainstreams—which turned the Germans into a nation of killers. The land of poets and philosophers was brought down by its poets and philosophers.

Most men, however, do not consider such issues in explicit terms. They absorb their ideas—implicitly, eclectically, and with many contradictions—from the cultural atmosphere around them, building into their souls without identifying it the various ideological vibrations emanating from school and church and arts and media and mores.

The Nazi] death camps," notes a writer in The New York Times, "were conceived, built and often administered by Ph.D.'s.

Hegel would not have been possible but for Kant, who would not have been possible but for Plato. These three, more than any others, are the intellectual builders of Auschwitz.