| # | Quote |
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| 1 | No-one is more naive than a cynic. |
| 2 | Only a man who extols the purity of a Love devoid of Desire, is capable of the depravity of a Desire devoid of Love. |
| 3 | Just as reasoning, to an irrational person, becomes rationalizing, and moral judgment becomes moralizing, so psychological theories become psychologizing. The common denominator is the corruption of a cognitive process to serve an ulterior motive. Psychologizing consists in condemning or excusing specific individuals on the grounds of their psychological problems, real or invented, in the absence of or contrary to factual evidence. |
| 4 | Armed with a smattering, not of knowledge, but of undigested slogans, they rush, unsolicited, to diagnose the problems of their friends and acquaintances. Pretentiousness and presumptuousness are the psychologizer's invariable characteristics: he not merely invades the privacy of his victims' minds, he claims to understand their minds better than they do, to know more than they do about their own motives. With reckless irresponsibility, which an old-fashioned mystic oracle would hesitate to match, he ascribes to his victims any motivation that suits his purpose, ignoring their denials. Since he is dealing with the great "unknowable"-which used to be life after death or extrasensory perception, but is now man's subconscious-all rules of evidence, logic and proof are suspended, and anything goes (which is what attracts him to his racket). While the racket of the philosophizing mystics rested on the claim that man is unable to know the external world, the racket of the psychologizing mystics rests on the claim that man is unable to know his own motivation. |
| 5 | If you do not defend the rights of the individual, how can you be said to really be defending the rights of minorities? |
| 6 | 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 |
| 7 | The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world. Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human life. Whether you live or die is an absolute. Whether you have a piece of bread or not, is an absolute. Whether you eat your bread or see it vanish into a looter's stomach, is an absolute. There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromise is the transmitting rubber tube |
| 8 | The truly and deliberately evil men are a very small minority; it is the appeaser who unleashes them on mankind; it is the appeaser's intellectual abdication that invites them to take over. When a culture's dominant trend is geared to irrationality, the thugs win over the appeasers. When intellectual leaders fail to foster the best in the mixed, unformed, vacillating character of people at large, the thugs are sure to bring out the worst. When the ablest men turn into cowards, the average men turn into brutes. |
| 9 | [Intellectual appeasement] is an attempt to apologize for his intellectual concerns and to escape from the loneliness of a thinker by professing that his thinking is dedicated to some social-altruistic goal. It is an attempt that amounts to the wordless equivalent of the plea: "I'm not an outsider! I'm your friend! Please forgive me for using my mind - I'm using it only in order to serve you!" . . . An intellectual appeaser surrenders morality, the realm of values, in order to be permitted to use his mind. |
| 10 | The task of evaluating the processes of man's subconscious is the province of psychology. Psychology does not regard its subject morally, but medically-i.e., from the aspect of health or malfunction (with cognitive competence as the proper standard of health). |
| 11 | As a science, psychology is barely making its first steps. It is still in the anteroom of science, in the stage of observing and gathering material from which a future science will come. This stage may be compared to the pre-Socratic period in philosophy; psychology has not yet found a Plato, let alone an Aristotle, to organize its material, systematize its problems and define its fundamental principles. |
| 12 | Today, we live in the Age of Envy. "Envy" is not the emotion I have in mind, but it is the clearest manifestation of an emotion that has remained nameless; it is the only element of a complex emotional sum that men have permitted themselves to identify. Envy is regarded by most people as a petty, superficial emotion and, therefore, it serves as a semihuman cover for so inhuman an emotion that those who feel it seldom dare admit it even to themselves. . . . That emotion is: hatred of the good for being the good. |
| 13 | [Anthem] 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. |
| 14 | Psychology departments have a sprinkling of Freudians, but are dominated by Behaviorism, whose leader is B. F. Skinner. (Here the controversy is between the claim that man is moved by innate ideas, and the claim that he has no ideas at all.) |
| 15 | There is now a new and deadly pressure on the doctors, which continuously threatens the independence and integrity of their medical judgment: the pressure to cave in to arbitrary Diagnosis-Related Group economies, while blanking out the effects on the patient. In some places, hospitals are offering special financial incentives to the physician whose expenditure per patient averages out to be relatively low. For example, the hospital might subsidize such a doctor's office rent or purchase new equipment for him. On the other hand, a doctor who insists on quality care for his Medicare patients and thereby drives up costs is likely to incur the hospital's displeasure. In the extreme case, the doctor risks being denied staff privileges, which means cutting off his major source of livelihood. Thanks to DRGs, a new conflict is in the offing, just starting to take shape: the patient vs. the hospital. To put it another way, the conflict is: doctors vs. hospitals - doctors fighting a rearguard action to maintain standards against hospitals that are forced by the government to become cost-cutting ogres. How would you like to practice a profession in which half your mind is devoted to healing the patient, while the other half is trying to appease a hospital administrator who himself is trying to appease some official in Washington? |
| 16 | No dictatorship has ever survived that did not institute censorship. |
| 17 | The kind of doctor who is willing or eager to practice medicine under these conditions represents a new breed, new at least in quantity. There is a generation of utterly unambitious young doctors growing up today, especially conspicuous in the HMOs, doctors who are the opposite of the old-fashioned physician in private practice - doctors who want to escape the responsibility of independent thought and judgment, and who are prepared to abandon the prospect of a large income or a private practice in order to achieve this end. These doctors do not mind the forfeit of their professional autonomy to the HMO administrator. They do not object to practicing cut-rate medicine with faceless patients on an assembly-line basis, so long as they themselves can escape blame for any bad results and cover their own tracks. These are the new bureaucratic doctors, the MDs with the mentality, and the fundamental indifference to their job, of the typical post-office clerk. |
| 18 | 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. |
| 19 | 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. |
| 20 | There was once a time when College Students studied facts, knowledge and human greatness. Now they study nothingness, ignorance, and the fool, the madman, the blind beggar, and the witch. |
| 21 | Between these two extremes of age - from college years to the culmination of a lifetime's struggle - lies a silent psychological horror story. It is the story of men who spend their lives apologizing for their own intelligence. |
| 22 | Man is not a Sacrificial Animal. |
| 23 | The man who lies to the world is the world's slave. |
| 24 | The difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian one is a matter of time. |
| 25 | [in 'Atlas Shrugged'] Accept the fact that achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose in your life. |
| 26 | The top three plays are: Cyrano de Bergerac, Cyrano de Bergerac, and Cyrano de Bergerac. It is without a doubt the greatest play in world literature. |
| 27 | The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me. |
| 28 | On growth: People create their own questions because they're afraid to look straight. All you have to do is look straight and see the road, and when you see it, don't sit looking at it-walk. |
| 29 | On love: Love is not self-sacrifice, but the most profound assertion of your own needs and values. It is for your own happiness that you need the person you love, and that is the greatest compliment, the greatest tribute you can pay to that person. |
| 30 | On strategy: In order to live...act; in order to act...make choices. |
| 31 | You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality. |
| 32 | The principle of free speech requires . . . that we do not pass laws forbidding Communists to speak. But the principle of free speech . . . does not imply that we owe them jobs and support to advocate our own destruction at our own expense. |
| 33 | The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. |
| 34 | Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. |
| 35 | Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values. |
| 36 | Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice. |
| 37 | [in "Brief Summary," The Objectivist, Sept. 1971] I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows. This--the supremacy of reason--was, is and will be the primary concern of my work, and the essence of Objectivism. |
| 38 | To hold an unchanging youth is to reach at the end, the vision with which one started. |
| 39 | Productive work is the central purpose of a rational man's life, the central value that integrates and determines the hierarchy of all his other values. Reason is the source, the precondition of his productive work - pride is the result. |
| 40 | Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future. |
| 41 | Altruism declares that any action taken for the benefit of others is good, and any action taken for one's own benefit is evil. Thus the beneficiary of an action is the only criterion of moral value - and so long as that beneficiary is anybody than oneself, anything goes. |
| 42 | The skyline of New York is a monument of a splendor that no pyramids or palaces will ever equal or approach. |
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