knownideal

[knownideal]

I love you, Dominique. As selfishly as the fact that I exist. As selfishly as my lungs breathe air. I breathe for my own necessity, for the fuel of my body, for my survival. I've given you, not my sacrifice or my pity, but my ego and my naked need.

Howard Roark, The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

[knownideal]

“You must learn not to be afraid of the world. Not to be held by it as you are now. Never to be hurt by it as you were in that courtroom. I must let you learn it. I can’t help you. You must find your own way. When you have, you’ll come back to me. They won’t destroy me, Dominique. And they won’t destroy you. You’ll win, because you’ve chosen the hardest way of fighting for your freedom from the world. I’ll wait for you. I love you. I’m saying this now for all the years we’ll have to wait. I love you, Dominique.”

The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand (via bookwormlily)

[knownideal]

I can accept anything, except what seems to be the easiest for most people: the halfway, the almost, the just about, the in-between.

Dominique Francon, The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

[knownideal]

[Selfless love] would have to mean that you derive no personal pleasure or happiness from the company and the existence of the person you love, and that you are motivated only by self-sacrificial pity for that person’s need of you. I don’t have to point out to you that no one would be flattered by, nor would accept, a concept of that kind. 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.

Ayn Rand in a 1964 Playboy Interview

[knownideal]

The secret dread of modern intellectuals, liberals and conservatives alike, the unadmitted terror at the root of their anxiety, which all of their current irrationalities are intended to stave off and to disguise, is the unstated knowledge that Soviet Russia is the full, actual, literal, consistent embodiment of the morality of altruism, that Stalin did not corrupt a noble ideal, that this is the only way altruism has to be or can ever be practiced. If service and self-sacrifice are a moral ideal, and if the “selfishness” of human nature prevents men from leaping into sacrificial furnaces, there is no reason – no reason that a mystic moralist could name – why a dictator should not push them in at the point of bayonets – for their own good, or the good of humanity, or the good of posterity, or the good of the latest bureaucrat’s five-year plan. There is no reason that they can name to oppose any atrocity. The value of a man’s life? His right to exist? His right to pursue his own happiness? These are concepts that belong to individualism and capitalism – to the antithesis of the altruist morality.

Ayn Rand   (via moralanarchism)

[knownideal]

“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. Once that principle is accepted, the rest is only a matter of time.”

Ayn Rand (via myanarchistproseandpoetry)

[knownideal]

I don’t believe that society has any responsibility towards anyone.  Neither the future leaders nor the future victims.  Society has nothing to do […] with the life of any one person, except to keep out of his way and give him a chance.

Ayn Rand on The Phil Donahue Show, 1979

[knownideal]

The Objectivist ethics holds that the actor must always be the beneficiary of his action and that man must act for his own rational self-interest. But his right to do so is derived from his nature as man and from the function of moral values in human life- and, therefore, is applicable only in the context of a rational, objectively demonstrated and validated code of moral principles which define and determine his actual self-interest. It is not a license “to do as he pleases” and it is not applicable to the altruists’ image of a “selfish” brute nor to any man motivated by irrational emotions, feelings, urges, wishes, or whims.

Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness

[knownideal]

The ethics of altruism has created the image of the brute […] in order to make men accept two inhuman tenets: (a) that any concern with one’s own interests is evil, regardless of what these interests might be, and (b) that the brute’s activities are in fact to one’s own interest (which altruism enjoins man to renounce for the sake of his neighbors).

Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness

[knownideal]

[Altruism] permits no concept of a self-respecting, self-supporting man- a man who supports his life by his own effort and neither sacrifices himself nor others. [Altruism] permits no view of man except as sacrificial animals and profiteers-on-sacrifice, as victims and parasites- [it] permits no concept of a benevolent co-existence among men- [it] permits no concept of justice.

Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness

[knownideal]

[…] The beauty of the human body is that it hasn’t a single muscle which doesn’t serve its purpose; there’s not a line wasted; that every detail of it fits one idea, the idea of a man and the life of a man.

Howark Roark,

The Fountainhead

by Ayn Rand (via

tucker-carlson

)

[knownideal]

A genuine letter written by Ayn Rand to Cat Fancy magazine. Happy April Fools!

[knownideal]

The other day I saw a bumper sticker that said 'Galt Taggart 2012' while driving in the Kansas City area.

That's the change America needs!

[knownideal]

If, in the course of philosophical detection, you find yourself, at times, stopped by the indignantly bewildered question: “How could anyone arrive at such nonsense?”—you will begin to understand it when you discover that evil philosophies are systems of rationalization.

Ayn Rand (via moralanarchism)

[knownideal]

Whatever you choose to consider, be it an object, an attribute or an action, the law of identity remains the same. A leaf cannot be a stone at the same time, it cannot be all red and all green at the same time, it cannot freeze and burn at the same time. A is A. Or, if you wish it stated in simpler language: You cannot have your cake and eat it, too.     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. The purpose of those who taught you to evade it, was to make you forget that Man is Man.

John Galt’s Speech, Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

[knownideal]

[knownideal]

If the truth shall kill them, let them die.

Immanuel Kant, paraphrased by Ayn Rand from Nathaniel Brandon’s, ‘Judgment Day: My Years with Ayn Rand’ (via aegeane)