Quotes About Objectivism

The anti-mind is the anti-life.

the fact that different cultures have different practices no more refutes [moral] objectivism than the fact that water flows in different directions in different places refutes the law of gravity

Objectivism holds that the good must be defined by a rational standard of value, that pleasure is not a first cause, but only a consequence

It's one thing to buy a copy of 'Atlas Shrugged.' You actually have to read it to get anything out of it.

Subsequent learning will tend to get processed through these imprints, and those with strong neophobic reflexes will usually, if they ever reject the initial dogmatic family reality-tunnel, settle at once into an equally dogmatic new reality-tunnel. E.g., if raised Catholic, they seldom become agnostics or zetetics; rather, they will move, like iron filings drawn by a magnet, to dogmatic atheism or even a crusading atheist religion like Marxism, Objectivism or CSICOP.

The subjectivist states his judgements, whereas the objectivist sweeps them under the carpet by calling assumptions knowledge, and he basks in the glorious objectivity of science.

I read The Fountainhead—that philosophy was all about having a giant penis and fucking the world and then saying, 'Hey, look, world, you are forced to bear my brainchild, so boom! Suck it!' I stand by my epithet

The thing for me about Ayn Rand is that her philosophy is the only one applicable to the world today - in every sense. If you take her ideas, then take them farther in your own mind, you can find answers to pretty well everything on an individual basis.

Here she was, stretched out on her back on a concrete bench, reading a book. It was The fountainhead , that noxious piece of crap that was then enjoying a certain vogue.

A God out there and values out there, if they existed, would be utterly useless and unintelligible to us. There is nothing to be gained by nostalgia for the old objectivism, which was in any case used only to justify arrogance, tyranny, and cruelty. People [forget] ... how utterly hateful the old pre-humanitarianism world was.

The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.

I tend to really be partial to Ayn Rand, and to The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.

'Atlas Shrugged,' let's face it, was probably the most important novel of the 20th century that was never a film.

Happiness is not to be achieved at the command of emotional whims.

For Ayn had built up a comprehensive systematic philosophy, which she calls Objectivism, and which, once you accept its first premises, is the most closely reasoned, rigorously logical and consistently interlocking world view and explanation since the great synthesis of Thomas Aquinas.

To irrational principles, one cannot be loyal. Ideas that are not derived from reality cannot be consistently practiced in reality. --as quoted by Leonard Peikoff in Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand

That which exists possesses identity; he could keep it out of existence by refusing to identify it.

No principle ever filled anybody's milk bottle

Miss Rand now tells us that what we have thought was right is really wrong. The lesson should have read: One for one and none for all.

I don't think a man can hurt another, not in any important way. Neither hurt him nor help him. I have really nothing to forgive you.

The anti-mind is the anti-life.

Reason, according to Objectivism, is not merely a distinguishing attribute of man; it is his fundamental attribute-his basic means of survival. Therefore, whatever reason requires in order to function is a necessity of human life.

But neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims.

Why does the number of those others take the place of truth? Why is truth made a mere matter of arithmetic—and only of addition at that?