Quotes from Leonard Peikoff

The dominant, mystical ideas of such cultures represent a nonrational approach to the world, not an antirational approach. In essence, the spokesmen of these earlier times did not know what reason is, or, therefore, what it makes possible in human life.

The branch of philosophy that studies knowledge is epistemology.

The branch of philosophy that studies values is ethics (or morality), which rests on both the above branches—on a view of the world in which man acts, and of man's nature, including his means of knowledge.

The system which Hitler established—the social reality which so many Germans were so eager to embrace or so willing to endure—the politics which began in a theory and ended in Auschwitz—was: the "total state." The term, from which the adjective "totalitarian" derives, was coined by Hitler's mentor, Mussolini.

The branch of philosophy that applies ethics to social questions is politics, which studies the nature of social systems and the proper functions of government.

The Nazi formations were trained to vent fury and sow terror—to break up meetings of opponents, to administer beatings, provoke street fights, stage riots, mutilate bodies, kick in skulls. These were the methods by which Hitler proposed to make his nationalism, his socialism, and his promises to every group come true.

The root cause of Nazism lies in a power that most people ignore, disparage—and underestimate. The cause is not the events hailed or cursed in headlines and street rallies, but the esoteric writings of the professors who, decades or centuries earlier, laid the foundation for those events.

The children declared that they would never speak of 'I' but only of 'we.' "2

three major philosophers who, above all others, are responsible for generating the disease of collectivism and transmitting it to the dictators of our century. The three are: Plato—Kant—Hegel. (The antidote to them is: Aristotle.)

In accordance with the method of "German socialism," the facade of a market economy was retained. All prices, wages, and interest rates, however, were "fixed by the central authority. They [were] prices, wages, and interest rates in appearance only; in reality they [were] merely determinations of quantity relations in the government's orders.... This is socialism in the outward guise of capitalism.

I call the Platonic mode "misintegration"—M. I call the Aristotelian mode simply "integration"—I. I call the Kantian mode "disintegration"—D.

Aristotle is the champion of this world, the champion of nature, as against the supematuralism of Plato.

Since DIM categories are epistemological, their applicability to a given individual is determined not by his mind's content, but by its method—not by what he thinks, but by why he thinks it.

Aristotle maintains that there is only one reality: the world of particulars in which we live, the world men perceive by means of their physical senses.

emotions differ from thought and action: they are an automatic function. But a man does choose his emotions—ultimately. He does it by virtue of his ability to think, and if necessary to rethink an issue, rejecting an invalid idea at the root of some feeling and replacing it by a new conclusion.

According to the Progressives, education is to be not subject-centered, but child-centered. ("We don't teach history, we teach Johnny.")

The reason-emotion dichotomy, however, cuts off this possibility; by teaching that emotions are independent of thought, it makes permanent the feeling of metaphysical helplessness.

More than any other form of human expression, art is the barometer that lays bare a period's view of reality, of life, of man.

Providence," said Hitler to Rauschning, has ordained that I should be the greatest liberator of humanity. I am freeing men from the restraints of an intelligence that has taken charge; from the dirty and degrading self-mortifications of a chimera called conscience and morality, and from the demands of a freedom and personal independence which only a very few can bear.45

The Nazis could not have won the support of the German masses but for the systematic preaching of a complex array of theories, doctrines, opinions, notions, beliefs. And not one of their central beliefs was original. They found those beliefs, widespread and waiting, in the culture; they seized upon them and broadcast them at top volume, thrusting them with a new intensity back into the streets of Germany.

Power belongs to the whole. The individual serves it. The whole is sovereign. . . . Everyone is given his place. There are commands and obedience.

So the first issue of a proper method is always set the proper context. What are you counting on? What do you already know by the time you get to this point? What are you taking for granted that enables you to study this particular topic?

rule by the losers—by those who, for whatever reason, cannot or choose not to achieve values on their own, but depend instead on the work and effort of others.

Clarity is achieved when concretes are united by a concept and a concept is seen to be a union of those concretes. The two gravest breaches of clarity are: a set of unrelated instances that causes too much pressure on consciousness and a floating abstraction untied to reality. These