"Objectivity is both a metaphysical & an epistemological concept. It pertains to the relationship of consciousness to existence. Metaphysically, it is the recognition of the fact that reality exists independent of any perceiver's consciousness. Epistemologically, it is the recognition of the fact that a perceiver's (man's) consciousness must acquire knowledge of reality by certain means (reason) in accordance with certain rules (logic). This means that although reality is immutable &, in any given context, only 1 answer is true, the truth is not automatically available to a human consciousness & can be obtained only by a certain mental process which is required of every man who seeks knowledge -- that there is no substitute for this process, no escape from the responsibility for it, no short-cuts, no special revelations to privileged observers -- & that there can be no such thing as a final 'authority' in matters pertaining to human knowledge. Metaphysically, the only authority is reality; epistemologically -- one's own mind. The 1st is the ultimate arbiter of the 2nd." [Ayn Rand, 1965 February, "Who Is the Final Authority in Ethics?" _The Objectivist NewsLetter_] ------- "Objectivity begins with the realization that man (including his every attribute & faculty, including his consciousness) is an entity of a specific nature who must act accordingly; that there is no escape from the law of identity, neither in the universe with which he deals nor in the working of his own consciousness, & if he is to acquire knowledge of the 1st, he must discover the proper method of using the 2nd; that there is no room for the arbitrary in any activity of man, least of all in his method of cognition -- & just as he has learned to be guided by objective criteria in making his physical tools, so he must be guided by objective criteria in forming his tools of cognition: his concepts." [Ayn Rand, 1979, _Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology_] ------- "It is axiomatic concepts that identify the precondition of knowledge: the distinction between existence & consciousness, between reality & the awareness of reality, between the object & the subject of cognition. Axiomatic concepts are the foundation of objectivity." [Ayn Rand, 1979, _Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology_] ------- "Most people... think that abstract thinking must be 'impersonal' -- which means that ideas must hold no personal meaning, value or importance to the thinker. This notion rests on the premise that a personal interest is an agent of distortion. But 'personal' does not mean 'non-objective'; it depends on the kind of person you are. If your thinking is determined by your emotions, then you will not be able to judge any thing, personally or impersonally. But if you are the kind of person who knows that reality is not your enemy, that truth & knowledge are of crucial, personal, selfish importance to you & to your own life -- then, the more passionately personal the thinking, the clearer & truer." [Ayn Rand, 1982, "Philosophical Detection" _Philosophy: Who Needs It?_] ------- "There are... 3 schools of thought on the nature of the good: the intrinsic, the subjective, & the objective. * The intrinsic theory holds that the good is inherent in certain things or actions as such, regardless of their context & consequences, regardless of any benefit or injury they may cause to the actors & subjects involved. It is a theory that divorces the concept of 'good' from beneficiaries, & the concept of 'value' from valuer & purpose -- claiming that the good is good in, by, & of itself. * The subjectivist theory holds that the good bears no relation to the facts of reality, that it is the product of a man's consciousness, created by his feelings, desires, 'intuitions', or whims, & that it is merely an 'arbitrary postulate' or an 'emotional commitment'... independent of reality... * The objective theory holds that the good is neither an attribute of 'things in themselves' nor of man's emotional states, but an evaluation of the facts of reality by man's consciousness according to a rational standard of value (...derived from the facts of reality & validated by a process of reason)... the good is an aspect of reality in relation to man -- & that it must be discovered, not invented, by man. Fundamental to an objective theory of values is the question: Of value to whom & for what? An objective theory does not permit context-dropping or 'concept-stealing'; it does not permit the separation of 'value' from 'purpose', of the good from beneficiaries, & of man's actions from reason." [Ayn Rand, 1966, "What Is Capitalism?" _Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal_ pp 21-22] ------- "A mixed economy has to reach the day when it faces a final crossroad: either the private sector regains its freedom and starts rebuilding - or it gives up and lets the absolute state take over the shamble." [Ayn Rand] ------- "Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value." [Francisco D'Anconia, in ATLAS SHRUGGED, by Ayn Rand] ------- "The most immoral contradiction--in the chaos of today's anti-ideological groups--is that of the so-called `conservatives' who posture as defenders of individual rights, particularly property rights, but uphold and advocate the draft. By what infernal evasion can they hope to justify the proposition that creatures who have no right to life, have the right to a bank account?" [Ayn Rand, "The Wreckage of the Consensus"] ------- "Are you seeking to know what is wrong with the world? All the disasters that have wrecked your world, came from your leaders' attempt to evade the fact that A is A. All the secret evil you dread to face within you and all the pain you have endured, came from your own attempt to evade the fact that A is A. The purpose of those who taught you to evade it, was to make you forget that Man is Man." [John Galt, in "Atlas Shrugged", Ayn Rand] ------- "Whoever claims the "right" to "redistribute" the wealth produced by others is claiming the "right" to treat human beings as chattel." [Ayn Rand] ------- "It's only human", you cry in defense of any depravity, reaching the stage of self-abasement where you seek to make the concept "human" mean the weakling, the fool, the rotter, the liar, the failure, the coward, the fraud, and to excise from the human race the hero, the thinker, the producer, the inventor, the strong, the purposeful, the pure - as if "to feel" were human, but to think were not, as if to fail were human, but to succeed were not, as if corruption were human, but virtue were not - as if the premise of DEATH were proper to man, but the premise of LIFE were not." [Ayn Rand, Galt's speech in Atlas Shrugged] ------- "The recognition of individual rights entails the banishment of physical force from human relationships: basically, rights can be violated only by means of force. In a capitalist society, no man or group may initiate the use of physical force against others. The only function of the gov't, in such a society, is the task of protecting man's rights, i.e. the task of protecting him from physical force; the gov't acts as the agent of man's right of self- defense, & may use force only in retaliation & only against those who initiate its use; thus the gov't is the means of placing the retaliatory use of force under objective control." [Ayn Rand, 1966 "What Is Capitalism?" _Capitalism_ pg 19 (quoted in Harry Binswanger 1986 _The Ayn Rand Lexicon_ pg 57)] ------- "Objectivism says: live by reason, follow a rational code of morality, practice self-interest as a virtue, establish the principle of limited government to define the appropriate use of retaliatory force... [this] philosophy upholds an objective reality, objective cognition, objective values, and objective law." [Peter Schwartz] ------- "Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?" said Dr. Ferris. "We *want* them broken. You'd better get it straight That it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against!--then you'll know that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We're after power and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you'd better get wise to it. There's no way to rule innocent men. 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. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted---and you create a nation of law-breakers---and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, Mr. Rearden, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with." [Ayn Rand, "Atlas Shrugged", Ch. III, "White Blackmail"] ------- "The tragic joke of human history is that on any of the altars men erected, it was always man whom they immolated and the animal whom they enshrined. It was always the animal's attributes, not man's, that humanity worshipped: the idol of instinct and the idol of force--the mystics and the kings--the mystics, who longed for an irresponsible consciousness and ruled by means of the claim that their dark emotions were superior to reason, that knowledge came in blind, causeless fits, blindly to be followed, not doubted--and the kings, who ruled by means of claws and muscles, with conquest as their method and looting as their aim, with a club or a gun as sole sanction of their power. The defenders of man's soul were concerned with his feelings, and the defenders of man's body were concerned with his stomach--but both were united against his mind." [Ayn Rand, "Atlas Shrugged", John Galt] ------- "Anyone who tells you to live for the collective, for the State -- is, or wants to be, the State." [Ayn Rand, responding to JFK's Inaugural Address "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.."] ------- "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." [Ayn Rand] ------- "Metaphysics: Objective reality, Epistemology: Reason, Ethics: Rational self-interest, Politics: Laissez-faire capitalism." [Ayn Rand, when asked to summarize her philosophy while standing on one foot] ------- "Objectivists are not `conservatives.' We are _radicals for capitalism_. We are fighting for that moral base which capitalism did not have and without which it was doomed to perish." [Ayn Rand, first issue of _Objectivist Newsletter_, 1962] ------- "Of all the nonsense that twists the world, the concept of 'altruism' is the worst. People do what they want to, every time. If it pains them, to make a choice- if the 'choice' looks like a 'sacrifice' -- you can be sure that it is no nobler than the discomfort caused by greediness... the necessity of having to decide between two things you want when you can't have both. The ordinary bloke suffers every time he chooses between spending a buck on beer or tucking it away for his kids, between getting up to go to work and losing his job. But he always chooses that which hurts least or pleasures most. The scoundrel and the saint make the same choices...." [Robert Heinlein, Jubal Harshaw "in Stranger in a Strange Land"] ------- "An irrational morality, a morality set in opposition to man's nature, to the facts of reality and to the requirements of man's survival, necessarily forces men to accept the belief that there is an inevitable clash between the moral and the practical -- that they must choose either to be virtuous or to be happy, to be idealistic or to be successful, but they cannot be both. This view establishes a disastrous conflict on the deepest level of man's being, a lethal dichotomy that tears man apart: it forces him to choose between making himself ABLE to live and making himself WORTHY of living. Yet self-esteem and mental health require that he achieve BOTH. If man holds life on earth as the good, if he judges his values by the standard of that which is proper to the existence of a rational being, then there is no clash between the requirements of survival and of morality -- no clash between making himself able to live and making himself worthy of living; he achieves the second by achieving the first." [Ayn Rand, 'The Virtue of Selfishness'] ------- "The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities." [Ayn Rand] ------- "It is only as retaliation that force may be used & 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. He uses force to seize a value; I use it only to destroy destruction." [Ayn Rand 1957 "This is John Galt Speaking" _Atlas Shrugged_] ------- "Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting for us in our graves or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth." [Ayn Rand] ------- "In that world, you'll be able to rise in the morning with the spirit you had known in your childhood: that spirit of eagerness, adventure and certainty which comes from dealing with a rational universe." [Ayn Rand] ------- "As a human being, you have no choice...that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought...or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false geralizations undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance..." [Ayn Rand] ------- "Civilization is the progress towards 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." [Ayn Rand, H. Roark in"The Fountainhead"] ------- "The mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain; there is no such thing as a collective thought." [Ayn Rand, "The Fountainhead"] ------- "Man has a single basic choice: to think or not, and that is the gauge of his virtue. Moral perfection is an unbreached rationality--not the degree of your intelligence, but the full and relentless use of your mind, not the extent of your knowledge, but the acceptance of reason as an absolute." [Ayn Rand, "Atlas Shrugged"] ------- "As there can be no causeless wealth, so there can be no causeless love or any sort of causeless emotion. An emotion is a response to a fact of reality, an estimate dictated by your standards. To love is to value." [Ayn Rand, "Atlas Shrugged"] ------- "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." [Ayn Rand, Objectivist Newsletter, December 1963] ------- "There is no escape from the fact that men have to make choices; so long as men have to make choices, there is no escape from moral values; so long as moral values are at stake, no moral neutrality is possible. To abstain from condemning a torturer, is to become an accessory to the torture & murder of his victims. The moral principle to adopt in this issue, is: 'Judge, & be prepared to be judged.'." [Ayn Rand 1962-04-?? "Rational Life in an Irrational Society" _The Virtue of Selfishness_ pg 72] ------- "I regard compassion as proper only toward those who are innocent victims, but not toward those who are morally guilty. If one feels compassion for the victims of a concentration camp, one cannot feel it for the torturers. If one does feel compassion for the torturers, it is an act of moral treason toward the victims." [Ayn Rand 1964 March interview _PlayBoy_] ------- "If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man's only moral commandment is: Thou shalt think. But a 'moral commandment' is a contradiction in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments." [Ayn Rand] ------- "When they have no pretense of authority left, no remnant of law, no trace of morality, no hope, no food and no way to obtain it, when their systems crash and they have no clue--then we'll come back to rebuild the world." [John Galt in Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged"] ------- "The action required to sustain human life is primarily intellectual: everything man needs has to be discovered by his mind & produced by his effort... Since knowledge, thinking, & rational action are properties of the individual, since the choice to exercise his rational faculty or not depends on the individual, man's survival requires that those who think be free of the interference of those who don't. Since men are neither omniscient nor infallible, they must be free to agree or disagree, to cooperate or to pursue their own independent course, each according to his own rational judgment. Freedom is the fundamental requirement of man's mind." [Ayn Rand] ------- "America's abundance was created not 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. They did not starve the people to pay for America's industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance -- and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way." [Ayn Rand] ------- "[T]he only real moral crime that one man can commit against another is the attempt to create, by his words or actions, an impression of the contradictory, the impossible, the irrational, and thus shake the concept of rationality in his victim." [Ayn Rand] ------- "As a basic step of self-esteem, learn to treat as the mark of a cannibal any man's *demand* for your help. To demand it is to claim that your life is *his* property." [John Galt in "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand] ------- "When men are caught in the trap of non-objective law, when their work, future & livelihood are at the mercy of a bureaucrat's whim, when they have no way of knowing what unknown 'influence' will crack down on them for which unspecified offense, fear becomes their basic motive... and compromise, conformity, staleness, dullness, the dismal grayness of the middle of the road are all that can be expected of them. Independent thinking does not submit to bureaucratic edicts, originality does not follow 'public policies', integrity does not petition for a license, heroism is not fostered by fear, creative genius is not summoned forth at the point of a gun. Non-objective law is the most effective weapon of human enslavement: its victims become its enforcers & enslave themselves." [Ayn Rand] ------- "Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.... Like every form of determinism, racism invalidates the specific attribute which distinguishes man from all other living species: his rational faculty." [Ayn Rand] ------- "Individualism is *not* dying, but it will die of those who defend it do not stop talking about "dying eras." That's pure Ellsworth Toohey party line. True, at the moment, the world is headed toward the chaos, horror and depravity of collectivism- but the world does not have to go that way. There are no "waves of the future" and no "historical materialism." Any trend can be stopped. Any step can be retrace- if men understand where they're going. Collectivism cannot win. It can only destroy." ["Letters of Ayn Rand," p. 225] ------- "There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil." [Ayn Rand] ------- "...observe that in all the propaganda of the ecologists amidst all their appeals to nature and pleas for 'harmony with nature' there is no discussion of man's needs and the requirements of his survival. Man is treated as if he were an unnatural phenomenon. Man cannot survive in the kind of state of nature that the ecologists envision i.e., on the level of sea urchins or polar bears..." [Ayn Rand, "The Anti-Industrial Revolution," The New Left, 136] ------- "The fundamental principle of capitalism is the separation of State and Economics. [Ayn Rand, "The Intellectual Bankruptcy of Our Age"] ------- "All the economic evils popularly ascribed to capitalism were caused, necessitated, and made possible not by private enterprise, not by free trade on a free market, but by government intervention into the economy, by government controls, favors, subsidies, franchises, and special privileges." [Ayn Rand, "The Intellectual Bankruptcy of Our Age"] ------- "Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others." [Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal] ------- "I oppose any doctrine which proposes the sacrifice of the individual to the collective, such as communism, socialism, the welfare state, fascism, Nazism and modern liberalism." [Ayn Rand, Playboy Magazine, March 1964] ------- "In the transitio n to statism, every infringement of human rights has begun with the suppression of a given right's least attractive practitioners." [Philosophy: Who Needs It?] ------- "Of all the statist violations of individual rights in a mixed economy, the military draft is the worst. It is an abrogation of rights. It negates man's fundamental right--the right to life--and establishes the fundamental principle of statism: that a man's life belongs to the state, and the state may claim it by compelling him to sacrifice it in battle. If the state may force a man to risk death or hideous maiming and crippling, in a war declared at the state's discretion, for a cause he may neither approve of nor even understand, if his consent is not required to send him into unspeakable martyrdom--then, in principle, all rights are negated in that state, and its government is not man's protector any longer. What is there left to protect? [Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal] ------- "Observe the paradoxes built up about capitalism. It has been called a system of selfishness...yet is it the only system that drew men to unite on a large scale into great countries, and peacefully cooperate across national boundaries, while all the collectivist, internationalist, One-World systems are splitting the world into Balkanized tribes. Capitalism has been called a system of greed - yet it is the system that raised the standard of living of its poorest citizens to heights no collectivist system has ever begun to equal. Capitalism has been called nationalistic - yet it is the only system that banished ethnicity, and made it possible, in the United States, for men of various, formerly antagonistic nationalities to live together in peace." [Ayn Rand, "Global Balkanization" in "Philosophy: Who Needs It?] ------- "[Our creed became] * Ayn Rand is the greatest human being who ever lived * Atlas Shrugged is the greatest human achievement in the history of the world * Ayn Rand, by virtue of her philosophical genius, is the supreme arbiter in any issue pertaining to what is rational, moral or appropriate to to man's life on earth * Once one is acquainted with Ayn Rand and/or her work, the measure of one's virtue is intrinsically tied to the position one takes regarding her and/or it * No one can be a good Objectivist who does not admire what Ayn Rand admires and condemn what Ayn Rand condemns * No one can be a fully consistent individual who disagrees with Ayn Rand on any fundamental issue * Since Ayn Rand has designated Nathaniel Branden as her "intellectual heir," and has repeatedly proclaimed him to be an ideal exponent of her philosophy, he is to be accorded only marginally less reverence than Ayn herself * It is best not to say most of these things explicitly (excepting, perhaps, the first two items.) One must always maintain that one arrives at one's beliefs solely by reasons". [Nathaniel Branden, "Judgement Day" (autobiography)] ------- "It's finished, your whole act. I'll tear down your facade as I built it up. I'll denounce you publically, I'll destroy you as I created you. I don't even care what it does to me. You won't have the career I gave you, or the name, or the wealth or the prestige. You'll have nothing ... If you've an ounce of morality left in you, an ounce of psychological health, you'll be impotent for the next twenty years." [Ayn Rand, to Nathaniel Branden, on learning that he was having an affair (or, rather, another affair, additional to the one he was already having with Rand). Reported by Barbara Branden,Nathaniel's then wife.] ------- "While the cultic qualities of the group sabotaged the inner circle, there remained (and remains) a huge following of those who ignore the indiscretions, infidelites and moral inconsistencies of the founder and focus instead on the positive aspects of her philosophy. There is much to admire, if you do not have to accept the whole package." [Michael Shermer, "Why People Believe Weird Things", "The Unlikeliest Cult; Ayn Rand, Objectivism and the Cult of Personality"] ------- "There can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob." [Ayn Rand] ------- "Remember that there is no such dichotomy as 'human rights' versus 'property rights.' No human rights can exist without property rights. Since material goods are produced by the mind and effort of individual men, and are needed to sustain their lives, if the producer does not own the result of his effort, he does not own his life. To deny property rights means to turn men into property owned by the state. Whoever claims the 'right' to 'redistribute' the wealth produced by others is claiming the 'right' to treat human beings as chattel." [Ayn Rand] ------- "There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism - by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide." [Ayn Rand, from "Foreign Policy Drains U.S. of Main Weapons"] ------- "A moral code impossible to practice, a code that demands imperfection or death, has taught you to dissolve all ideas in fog, to permit no firm definitions, to regard any concept as approximate & any rule of conduct as elastic, to hedge on any principle, to compromise on any value, to take the middle of any road." [Ayn Rand] ------- "We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force." [Ayn Rand, "The Nature of Government"] ------- "For the word 'we' is as lime poured over men, which sets and hardens to stone, & crushes all beneath it, & that which is white & that which is black are lost equally in the grey of it. It is the word by which the depraved steal the virtue of the good, by which the weak steal the might of the strong, by which the fools steal the wisdom of the sages." [Ayn Rand, _Anthem_ pg 112] -------