Quotes from Leonard Peikoff

The more you learn, if you learn it properly, the more clear you become and the more you know.

The unphilosophical majority among men are the ones most helplessly dependent on their era's dominant ideas.

Each man must reach his own verdict, by weighing all the relevant evidence.

To save the world is the simplest thing in the world. All one has to do is think.

The worse the coming future, the more it should motivate its opponents.

The man who waits for reality to write the truth inside his soul waits in vain.

The artist is the closest man comes to being God.

Principles make it simple.

In any compromise between food and poison," Ayn Rand writes, "it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.

Logic, order, truth, reason, we consign them all to the oblivion of death," said one Surrealist manifesto. We must "cultivate the hatred of intelligence," said the leader of the Futurists, Filippo Marinetti, an artist hailed by Mussolini as the John the Baptist of Fascism.17

The authority of the Führer is not limited by checks and controls, by special autonomous bodies or individual rights, but it is free and independent, all-inclusive and unlimited," said Ernst Huber, an official party spokesman, in 1933.

The deepest roots of this modern shift are twofold: in epistemology, the romanticist advocacy of feeling as superior to reason; in ethics, the altruist advocacy of others as superior to self. The result is a view of morality in which the ruling standard is: the feelings of others.

The nationalists, at heart, were socialists. The socialists, at heart, were nationalists.

The principles of morality are a product not of feeling, but of cognition.

I believe that a proper education in grade school would achieve much more for the general public than getting an M.A. in the best college today ever would. You do not need millions of courses across decades and decades. That is a modern absurdity. It is the result of a worthless, self-perpetuating educational bureaucracy. Even with the explosion of knowledge, you can give people a proper, thorough education by the time they are a normal high school graduate.

Social justice" in this view not only allows but demands the use of force against the non-sacrificial individual; it demands that others put a stop to his evil. Thus has moral fervor been joined to the rule of physical force, raising it from a criminal tactic to a governing principle of human relationships.

Evil, for Objectivism, means the willful ignorance or defiance of reality. This has to mean: that which cannot deal with reality, that which is whim-ridden, context-dropping, self-contradictory. Evil is consistent in only one regard: its essence is consistently at war with all the values and virtues human life requires.

A philosophy of education, in short, is essential to being a proper parent; otherwise, you are merely turning your child over to blind chance.

Statism and the advocacy of reason are philosophical opposites. They cannot coexist—neither in a philosophic system nor in a nation.

The rational (the good) has nothing to gain from the irrational (the evil)," observes Ayn Rand, "except a share of its failures and crimes. . . ."17

Ayn Rand defines "value" as "that which one acts to gain and/or keep."3 "Value" denotes the object of an action: it is that which some entity's action is directed to acquiring or preserving

The fundamental goal of education, writes Dewey, "is the development of a spirit of social co-operation and community life...." The goal is to foster the child's "social capacity"—by, among other things, "saturating him with the spirit of service...."21

The Nazis take the skeleton in the closet of centuries and rattle it boastfully. Force, they declare, will always be necessary, since it is in the nature of human life (which is true, if one accepts their concept of human life).

The mental practice that underlies the anti-effort attitude is the act of evasion, of blanking out some fact of reality which one dislikes. This act constitutes the essence of irrationality and, therefore, of evil. Evasion is the Objectivist equivalent of a mortal sin. It is the only such sin that we recognize, because it is what makes possible every other form of moral corruption. 27