Nazism in politics was a form of statism. In principle, it did not represent a new approach to government; it was a continuation of the political absolutism—the absolute monarchies, the oligarchies, t...
Both sides in Germany’s cultural battle elevated feeling above reason. And both sides experienced the same basic kind of feeling. The left called it alienation or the angst of nothingness. The right c...
Man, Aristotle held, must first grasp the appropriate facts of reality; on this basis, he can then set the goals and course of his action. Pragmatism represents a total reversal of this progression. F...
In an advanced, civilized country, a handful of men were able to gain for their criminal schemes the enthusiastic backing of millions of decent, educated, law-abiding citizens. What is the factor that...
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...
Germany has been called the land of poets and philosophers. But its education offered the country no protection against the Sergeant Molls in its ranks.
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...
The rational (the good) has nothing to gain from the irrational (the evil), observes Ayn Rand, except a share of its failures and crimes. . . .17
The fundamental goal of education, writes Dewey, is the development of a spirit of social co-operation and community life.... The goal is to foster the child’s social capacity—by, among other things,...
An individual can be hurt in countless ways by other men's irrationality, dishonesty, injustice. Above all, he can be disappointed, perhaps grievously, by the vices of a person he had once trusted or...
When the country surrendered its educational institutions—in countless forms, direct and indirect, public and private, from nursery school on up—to the legion of Progressive educators spawned by Dewey...
The pre-Greek civilizations, never discovering the field of epistemology, had no explicit idea of a cognitive process which is systematic, secular, observation-based, logic-ruled; the medievals for ce...
The man who waits for reality to write the truth inside his soul waits in vain.
The best-known version of this view, the Existentialism of the fifties and sixties, held that reality is absurd and that irrational passion is the only means of knowledge.
Racial subjectivism holds that a man’s inborn racial constitution determines his mental processes, his intellectual outlook, his thought patterns, his feelings, his conclusions—and that these conclusi...
On this view, the individual has reality only as part of the group, and value only insofar as he serves it; on his own he has no political rights; he is to be sacrificed for the group whenever it—or i...
I say close down the schools of education. At most, all that is required is a one-year post-high school course on practical advice: tips on motivating;
Evil, for Objectivism, means the willful ignorance or defiance of reality. This has to mean: that which cannot deal with reality, that which is whim-ridden, context-dropping, self-contradictory. Evil...
An interest, writes Kant, is present only in a dependent will which is not of itself always in accord with reason; in the divine will we cannot conceive of an interest.