The artist is the closest man comes to being God.
In later years, the creators of Weimar culture, the ones who survived, cursed the German people for not having listened to them. The tragedy is that the people had listened.
Observe in this connection that the Nazis, correctly, regarded the power of propaganda as an indispensable tool.
Kant also found it necessary to deny happiness, in order to make room for duty. The essence of moral virtue, he says, is selflessness—selfless, lifelong obedience to duty, without any expectation of r...
If a man is skeptical about the role of philosophy in life, let him put aside philosophy books. Let him leave the cloistered ivory tower of theory and plunge into the sprawling realms of practice. Let...
Every argument for God and every attribute ascribed to Him rests on a false metaphysical premise. None can survive for a moment on a correct metaphysics....Existence exists, and only existence exists....
[There is] a widespread approach to ideas which Objectivism repudiates altogether: agnosticism. I mean this term in a sense which applies to the question of God, but to many other issues also, such as...
To liberate humanity from intelligence, Hitler counted on the doctrines of irrationalism. To rid men of conscience, he counted on the morality of altruism. To free the world of freedom, he counted on...
The mental practice that underlies the anti-effort attitude is the act of evasion, of blanking out some fact of reality which one dislikes. This act constitutes the essence of irrationality and, there...
Most men, however, do not consider such issues in explicit terms. They absorb their ideas—implicitly, eclectically, and with many contradictions—from the cultural atmosphere around them, building into...
In degree, however, the total state does differ from its predecessors: it represents statism pressed to its limits, in theory and in practice, devouring the last remnants of the individual.
German socialism had to overcome this private, that is, unrestrained and irresponsible view of property. All property is common property. The owner is bound by the people and the Reich to the responsi...
Clarity is achieved when concretes are united by a concept and a concept is seen to be a union of those concretes. The two gravest breaches of clarity are: a set of unrelated instances that causes too...
Ayn Rand defines value as that which one acts to gain and/or keep.3 Value denotes the object of an action: it is that which some entity’s action is directed to acquiring or preserving
This is the actual answer to Auschwitz. We are told insistently to remember the Holocaust. Eloquent, horrifying books describe the facts to us in every detail. The truth about a monstrous, historic ev...
Providence, said Hitler to Rauschning, has ordained that I should be the greatest liberator of humanity. I am freeing men from the restraints of an intelligence that has taken charge; from the dirty a...
In any compromise between food and poison, Ayn Rand writes, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.
In a primacy-of-consciousness philosophy, virtue consists of allegiance to the ruling consciousness, such as God or society. In Ayn Rand’s philosophy, virtue consists of allegiance to existence; it co...
Hannah Arendt, the best and most philosophically inclined of the commentators, is also, in regard to her ultimate conclusions, the worst, i.e., the most perversely wrong-headed. In a final warning, sh...
During the twenties, Germany’s youngsters (both rightist and leftist) were in the vanguard of the growing rebellion against the Weimar Republic. The youngsters were rebelling against the establishment...