objectivism

Link	Quote	Tags	Author
6920ad3	I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle.	philosophy taggart objectivism	Ayn Rand
aa964e4	Devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality; there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.	philosophy taggart objectivism	Ayn Rand
b324546	Who is John Galt?	philosophy galt taggart objectivism opening-lines	Ayn Rand
68d4985	I never found beauty in longing for the impossible and never found the possible to be beyond my reach.	philosophy taggart objectivism	Ayn Rand
73f2947	Joy is the goal of existence, and joy is not to be stumbled upon, but to be achieved, and the act of treason is to let its vision drown in the swamp of the moment's torture.	philosophy taggart objectivism	Ayn Rand
76d5618	Do you know the hallmark of a second rater? It's resentment of another man's achievement. Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own - they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal - for a mind to respect and an achievement to admire. They bare their teeth at you from out of their rat holes,thinking that you take pleasure in letting your brilliance dim them - while you'd give a year of my life to see a flicker of talent anywhere among them. They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear. They have no way of knowing what he feels when surrounded by inferiors - hatred? no, not hatred, but boredom - the terrible, hopeless, draining, paralyzing boredom. Of what account are praise and adulation from men whom you don't respect? Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?	inspirational atlas-shrugged second-handers objectivism achievement mediocrity	Ayn Rand
0809204	Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?	love inspirational atlas-shrugged objectivism achievement admiration	Ayn Rand
9e7465e	"Do you know the hallmark of a second rater? It's resentment of another man's achievement. Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own - they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal - for a mind to respect and an achievement to admire. They bare their teeth at you from out of their rat holes,thinking that you take pleasure in letting your brilliance dim them - while you'd give a year of my life to see a flicker of talent anywhere among them. They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear. They have no way of knowing what he feels when surrounded by inferiors - hatred? no, not hatred, but boredom - the terrible, hopeless, draining, paralyzing boredom. Of what account are praise and adulation from men whom you don't respect? Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?" "I've felt it all my life," she said."	inspirational atlas-shrugged second-handers objectivism mediocrity	Ayn Rand
4bfb543	Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. Their goals differed, but they all had this in common: that the step was first, the road new, the vision unborrowed, and the response they received -- hatred. The great creators -- the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors -- stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new thought was opposed. Every great new invention was denounced. The first motor was considered foolish. The airplane was considered impossible. The power loom was considered vicious. Anesthesia was considered sinful. But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered and they paid. But they won.	objectivism vision	Ayn Rand
2045ef1	I take no pride in hopeless longing; I wouldn't hold a stillborn aspiration. I'd want to have it, to make it, to live it.	philosophy taggart objectivism	Ayn Rand
543e505	I do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and I do not live in chronic dread of disaster. It is no happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that I regard as the abnormal exception in Human Life.	philosophy galt taggart objectivism ayn-rand	Ayn Rand
9dae730	Thousands of years ago the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burnt at the stake he'd taught his brothers to light, but he left them a gift they had not conceived and he lifted darkness from the face of the Earth.	integrity objectivism	Ayn Rand
ef12465	Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man's values, it has to be earned. His own happiness is man's only moral purpose, but only his own virtue can achieve it...Life is the reward of virtue- and happiness is the goal and the reward of life. Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy- a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your won destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but using your mind's fullest power. Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seek nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing bu rational actions. The symbol of all relationships among such men, the moral symbol of respect for human beings, is the trade...A trader is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved.	philosophical philosophy objectivism	Ayn Rand
c559f27	Don't worry. They're all against me. But I have one advantage: they don't know what they want. I do.	objectivism	Ayn Rand
36654c3	To sum it all up, the [Ayn] Rand belief system looks like this: 1. Facts are facts: things can be absolutely right or absolutely wrong, as determined by reason. 2. According to my reasoning, I am absolutely right. 3. Charity is immoral. 4. Pay for your own fucking schools.	philosophy objectivism cynicism	Matt Taibbi
d932131	Saint Petersburg in revolt gave us Vladimir Nabokov, Isaiah Berlin, and Ayn Rand. The first was a novelist, the second a philosopher. The third was neither but thought she was both.	objectivism	Corey Robin
3d2eb30	No! I don't want to speak of that! But I'm going to. I want you to hear. I want you to know what's in store for you. There will be days when you'll look at your hands and you'll want to take something and smash every bone in them, because they'll be taunting you with what they could do, if you found a chance for them to do it, and you can't find that chance, and you can't bear your living body because it has failed those hands somewhere. There will be days when a bus driver will snap at you as you enter a bus, and he'll be only asking for a dime, but that won't be what you hear; you'll hear that you're nothing, that he's laughing at you, that it's written on your forehead, that thing they hate you for. There will be days when you'll stand in the corner of a hall and listen to a creature on a platform talking about buildings, about the work you love, and the things he'll say will make you wait for somebody to rise and crack him open between two thumbnails; and then you'll hear people applauding him, and you'll want to scream, because you won't know whether they're real or you are, whether you're in a room full of gored skulls, or whether someone has just emptied your own head, and you'll say nothing, because the sounds you could make - they're not a language in that room any longer; but you'd want to speak, you won't anyway, because you'll be brushed aside, you who have nothing to tell them about buildings! Is that what you want?	objectivism purpose perception	Ayn Rand
bd398ef	We are on strike against martyrdom--and against the moral code that demands it. We are on strike against those who believe that one man must exist for the sake of another. We are on strike against the morality of cannibals, be it practiced in body or in spirit. We will not deal with men on any terms but ours--and our terms are a moral code which holds that man is an end in himself and not the means to any end of others.	rational-egoism objectivism ayn-rand individualism	Ayn Rand
c382297	"A castaway in the sea was going down for the third time when he caught sight of a passing ship. Gathering his last strength, he waved frantically and called for help. Someone on board peered at him scornfully and shouted back, "Get a boat!"	poverty objectivism jobs homelessness	Daniel Quinn
9026e3d	The age of the skyscraper is gone. This is the age of the housing project. Which is always a prelude to the age of the cave.	housing-projects human-regression objectivism society	Ayn Rand
8b71e73	No happy person can be quite so impervious to pain (Gail Wynand to Dominique Francon)	objectivism	Ayn Rand
552e45f	We, Equality 7-2521, were not happy in those year in the Home of the Students. It was not that the learning was too hard for us. It was that the learning was too easy. This is a great sin, to be born with a head which is too quick. It is not good to be different from our brothers, but it is evil to be superior to them. The Teachers told us so, and they frowned when they looked at us.	individuality intelligence objectivism schooling teachers students	Ayn Rand
8992607	The view that man was ever to be drawn by some vision of the unattainable shining ahead, doomed ever to aspire, but not to achieve, my life and my values could not bring me to that.	philosophy taggart objectivism	Ayn Rand
905dbb4	"You want to know what's wrong with the world?" Dad paused. "It's this alienation that permeates every aspect of humanity."	christianity humanity philosophy world-views objectivism ayn-rand	Mark David Henderson
667b300	Thinking is man's only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one's consciousness, the refusal to think - not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment - on the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the verdict 'It is.	virtue man mind good morality reason life philosophy truth wisdom john-galt pursuit-of-happiness objectivism rational think thinking morals values evil	Ayn Rand
958e313	Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice -- and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man -- by choice; he has to hold his life as a value -- by choice; he has to learn to sustain it -- by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues -- by choice. A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.	virtue man mind good morality choice reason life philosophy john-galt pursuit-of-happiness objectivism rational think thinking morals values evil	Ayn Rand
3a71a5f	Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it--that no substitute can do your thinking--that the vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your existence.	virtue pain man mind good independence morality reason happiness life philosophy truth wisdom john-galt pursuit-of-happiness objectivism rational think thinking morals values evil	Ayn Rand
3297c43	Happiness is the successful state of life, pain is an agent of death. Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values. A morality that dares to tell you to find happiness in the renunciation of your happiness--to value the failure of your values--is an insolent negation of morality.	virtue man mind good morality reason happiness life philosophy john-galt pursuit-of-happiness objectivism rational think thinking morals values evil	Ayn Rand
4c555ad	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 ever endured, came from your own attempt to evade the fact that A is A.	virtue man mind good morality reason life philosophy truth wisdom john-galt pursuit-of-happiness objectivism rational think thinking morals values evil	Ayn Rand
a514c2b	Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.	virtue man mind existence morality reason life philosophy truth wisdom john-galt pursuit-of-happiness objectivism rational think consciousness thinking morals values	Ayn Rand
d4aa10e	Rationality is the recognition of the fact that existence exists, that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it, which is thinking--that the mind is one's only judge of values and one's only guide of action--that reason is an absolute that permits no compromise--that a concession to the irrational invalidates one's consciousness and turns it from the task of perceiving to the task of faking reality--that the alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind--that the acceptance of a mystical invention is a wish for the annihilation of existence and, properly, annihilates one's consciousness.	virtue pain man mind good morality reason happiness life philosophy truth wisdom john-galt pursuit-of-happiness objectivism rational think thinking morals values evil	Ayn Rand
9c425e3	Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies...It is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the concept of 'Value' possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.	virtue man mind good morality reason life philosophy john-galt pursuit-of-happiness objectivism think thinking morals values evil	Ayn Rand

6920ad3

I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle.

philosophy taggart objectivism

Ayn Rand

aa964e4

Devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality; there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.

philosophy taggart objectivism

Ayn Rand

b324546

Who is John Galt?

philosophy galt taggart objectivism opening-lines

Ayn Rand

68d4985

I never found beauty in longing for the impossible and never found the possible to be beyond my reach.

philosophy taggart objectivism

Ayn Rand

73f2947

Joy is the goal of existence, and joy is not to be stumbled upon, but to be achieved, and the act of treason is to let its vision drown in the swamp of the moment's torture.

philosophy taggart objectivism

Ayn Rand

76d5618

Do you know the hallmark of a second rater? It's resentment of another man's achievement. Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own - they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal - for a mind to respect and an achievement to admire. They bare their teeth at you from out of their rat holes,thinking that you take pleasure in letting your brilliance dim them - while you'd give a year of my life to see a flicker of talent anywhere among them. They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear. They have no way of knowing what he feels when surrounded by inferiors - hatred? no, not hatred, but boredom - the terrible, hopeless, draining, paralyzing boredom. Of what account are praise and adulation from men whom you don't respect? Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?

inspirational atlas-shrugged second-handers objectivism achievement mediocrity

Ayn Rand

0809204

Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?

love inspirational atlas-shrugged objectivism achievement admiration

Ayn Rand

9e7465e

"Do you know the hallmark of a second rater? It's resentment of another man's achievement. Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own - they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal - for a mind to respect and an achievement to admire. They bare their teeth at you from out of their rat holes,thinking that you take pleasure in letting your brilliance dim them - while you'd give a year of my life to see a flicker of talent anywhere among them. They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear. They have no way of knowing what he feels when surrounded by inferiors - hatred? no, not hatred, but boredom - the terrible, hopeless, draining, paralyzing boredom. Of what account are praise and adulation from men whom you don't respect? Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?" "I've felt it all my life," she said."

inspirational atlas-shrugged second-handers objectivism mediocrity

Ayn Rand

4bfb543

Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. Their goals differed, but they all had this in common: that the step was first, the road new, the vision unborrowed, and the response they received -- hatred. The great creators -- the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors -- stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new thought was opposed. Every great new invention was denounced. The first motor was considered foolish. The airplane was considered impossible. The power loom was considered vicious. Anesthesia was considered sinful. But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered and they paid. But they won.

objectivism vision

Ayn Rand

2045ef1

I take no pride in hopeless longing; I wouldn't hold a stillborn aspiration. I'd want to have it, to make it, to live it.

philosophy taggart objectivism

Ayn Rand

543e505

I do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and I do not live in chronic dread of disaster. It is no happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that I regard as the abnormal exception in Human Life.

philosophy galt taggart objectivism ayn-rand

Ayn Rand

9dae730

Thousands of years ago the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burnt at the stake he'd taught his brothers to light, but he left them a gift they had not conceived and he lifted darkness from the face of the Earth.

integrity objectivism

Ayn Rand

ef12465

Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man's values, it has to be earned. His own happiness is man's only moral purpose, but only his own virtue can achieve it...Life is the reward of virtue- and happiness is the goal and the reward of life. Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy- a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your won destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but using your mind's fullest power. Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seek nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing bu rational actions. The symbol of all relationships among such men, the moral symbol of respect for human beings, is the trade...A trader is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved.

philosophical philosophy objectivism

Ayn Rand

c559f27

Don't worry. They're all against me. But I have one advantage: they don't know what they want. I do.

objectivism

Ayn Rand

36654c3

To sum it all up, the [Ayn] Rand belief system looks like this: 1. Facts are facts: things can be absolutely right or absolutely wrong, as determined by reason. 2. According to my reasoning, I am absolutely right. 3. Charity is immoral. 4. Pay for your own fucking schools.

philosophy objectivism cynicism

Matt Taibbi

d932131

Saint Petersburg in revolt gave us Vladimir Nabokov, Isaiah Berlin, and Ayn Rand. The first was a novelist, the second a philosopher. The third was neither but thought she was both.

objectivism

Corey Robin

3d2eb30

No! I don't want to speak of that! But I'm going to. I want you to hear. I want you to know what's in store for you. There will be days when you'll look at your hands and you'll want to take something and smash every bone in them, because they'll be taunting you with what they could do, if you found a chance for them to do it, and you can't find that chance, and you can't bear your living body because it has failed those hands somewhere. There will be days when a bus driver will snap at you as you enter a bus, and he'll be only asking for a dime, but that won't be what you hear; you'll hear that you're nothing, that he's laughing at you, that it's written on your forehead, that thing they hate you for. There will be days when you'll stand in the corner of a hall and listen to a creature on a platform talking about buildings, about the work you love, and the things he'll say will make you wait for somebody to rise and crack him open between two thumbnails; and then you'll hear people applauding him, and you'll want to scream, because you won't know whether they're real or you are, whether you're in a room full of gored skulls, or whether someone has just emptied your own head, and you'll say nothing, because the sounds you could make - they're not a language in that room any longer; but you'd want to speak, you won't anyway, because you'll be brushed aside, you who have nothing to tell them about buildings! Is that what you want?

objectivism purpose perception

Ayn Rand

bd398ef

We are on strike against martyrdom--and against the moral code that demands it. We are on strike against those who believe that one man must exist for the sake of another. We are on strike against the morality of cannibals, be it practiced in body or in spirit. We will not deal with men on any terms but ours--and our terms are a moral code which holds that man is an end in himself and not the means to any end of others.

rational-egoism objectivism ayn-rand individualism

Ayn Rand

c382297

"A castaway in the sea was going down for the third time when he caught sight of a passing ship. Gathering his last strength, he waved frantically and called for help. Someone on board peered at him scornfully and shouted back, "Get a boat!"

poverty objectivism jobs homelessness

Daniel Quinn

9026e3d

The age of the skyscraper is gone. This is the age of the housing project. Which is always a prelude to the age of the cave.

housing-projects human-regression objectivism society

Ayn Rand

8b71e73

No happy person can be quite so impervious to pain (Gail Wynand to Dominique Francon)

objectivism

Ayn Rand

552e45f

We, Equality 7-2521, were not happy in those year in the Home of the Students. It was not that the learning was too hard for us. It was that the learning was too easy. This is a great sin, to be born with a head which is too quick. It is not good to be different from our brothers, but it is evil to be superior to them. The Teachers told us so, and they frowned when they looked at us.

individuality intelligence objectivism schooling teachers students

Ayn Rand

8992607

The view that man was ever to be drawn by some vision of the unattainable shining ahead, doomed ever to aspire, but not to achieve, my life and my values could not bring me to that.

philosophy taggart objectivism

Ayn Rand

905dbb4

"You want to know what's wrong with the world?" Dad paused. "It's this alienation that permeates every aspect of humanity."

christianity humanity philosophy world-views objectivism ayn-rand

Mark David Henderson

667b300

Thinking is man's only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one's consciousness, the refusal to think - not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment - on the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the verdict 'It is.

virtue man mind good morality reason life philosophy truth wisdom john-galt pursuit-of-happiness objectivism rational think thinking morals values evil

Ayn Rand

958e313

Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice -- and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man -- by choice; he has to hold his life as a value -- by choice; he has to learn to sustain it -- by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues -- by choice. A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.

virtue man mind good morality choice reason life philosophy john-galt pursuit-of-happiness objectivism rational think thinking morals values evil

Ayn Rand

3a71a5f

Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it--that no substitute can do your thinking--that the vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your existence.

virtue pain man mind good independence morality reason happiness life philosophy truth wisdom john-galt pursuit-of-happiness objectivism rational think thinking morals values evil

Ayn Rand

3297c43

Happiness is the successful state of life, pain is an agent of death. Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values. A morality that dares to tell you to find happiness in the renunciation of your happiness--to value the failure of your values--is an insolent negation of morality.

virtue man mind good morality reason happiness life philosophy john-galt pursuit-of-happiness objectivism rational think thinking morals values evil

Ayn Rand

4c555ad

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 ever endured, came from your own attempt to evade the fact that A is A.

virtue man mind good morality reason life philosophy truth wisdom john-galt pursuit-of-happiness objectivism rational think thinking morals values evil

Ayn Rand

a514c2b

Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.

virtue man mind existence morality reason life philosophy truth wisdom john-galt pursuit-of-happiness objectivism rational think consciousness thinking morals values

Ayn Rand

d4aa10e

Rationality is the recognition of the fact that existence exists, that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it, which is thinking--that the mind is one's only judge of values and one's only guide of action--that reason is an absolute that permits no compromise--that a concession to the irrational invalidates one's consciousness and turns it from the task of perceiving to the task of faking reality--that the alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind--that the acceptance of a mystical invention is a wish for the annihilation of existence and, properly, annihilates one's consciousness.

virtue pain man mind good morality reason happiness life philosophy truth wisdom john-galt pursuit-of-happiness objectivism rational think thinking morals values evil

Ayn Rand

9c425e3

Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies...It is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the concept of 'Value' possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.

virtue man mind good morality reason life philosophy john-galt pursuit-of-happiness objectivism think thinking morals values evil

Ayn Rand