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.
Ayn RandTags: philosophy galt objectivism taggart atlas-shrugged ayn-rand
Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone.
Ayn RandTags: atlas-shrugged ayn-rand
When I die, I hope to go to Heaven, whatever the Hell that is.
Ayn RandTags: humor objectivism ayn-rand
Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, doubtless two of the most exquisitely adolescent of fictions.
Nancy MairsTags: ayn-rand
A man's ego is the fountainhead of human progress.
Ayn RandTags: inspirational ayn-rand the-fontainhead
I like to think of fire held in a man's hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what great things have come from such hours. When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind--and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression.
Ayn RandTags: atlas-shrugged ayn-rand cigaratte
But I still wonder how it was possible, in those graceless years of transition, long ago, that men did not see whither they were going, and went on, in blindness and cowardice, to their fate. I wonder, for it is hard for me to conceive how men who knew the word "I," could give it up and not know what they lost. But such has been the story, for I have lived in the City of the damned, and I know what horror men permitted to be brought upon them.
Ayn RandTags: individuality freedom ayn-rand anthem
Why have you been staring at me ever since we met? Because I’m not the Gail Wynand you’d heard about. You see, I love you. And love is exception-making. If you were in love you’d want to be broken, trampled, ordered, dominated, because that’s the impossible, in the inconceivable for you in your relations with people. That would be the one gift, the great exception you’d want to offer the man you loved. But it wouldn’t be easy for you.
Ayn RandTags: love romance ayn-rand romance-novels
At least two important conservative thinkers, Ayn Rand and Leo Strauss, were unbelievers or nonbelievers and in any case contemptuous of Christianity. I have my own differences with both of these savants, but is the Republican Party really prepared to disown such modern intellectuals as it can claim, in favor of a shallow, demagogic and above all sectarian religiosity?
Perhaps one could phrase the same question in two further ways. At the last election, the GOP succeeded in increasing its vote among American Jews by an estimated five percentage points. Does it propose to welcome these new adherents or sympathizers by yelling in the tones of that great Democrat bigmouth William Jennings Bryan? By insisting that evolution is 'only a theory'? By demanding biblical literalism and by proclaiming that the Messiah has already shown himself? If so, it will deserve the punishment for hubris that is already coming its way. (The punishment, in other words, that Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson believed had struck America on Sept. 11, 2001. How can it be that such grotesque characters, calling down divine revenge on the workers in the World Trade Center, are allowed a respectful hearing, or a hearing at all, among patriotic Republicans?).
[. . . And Why I'm Most Certainly Not! -- The Wall Street Journal, Commentary Column. May 5, 2005]
Tags: politics christianity religion atheism united-states jesus evolution fundamentalism jews ayn-rand creationism pat-robertson world-trade-center democratic-party-united-states william-jennings-bryan september-11-attacks american-jews leo-strauss 2001 sectarianism 2000 republican-party-united-states 2003 biblical-literalism christian-fundamentalism christian-right jerry-falwell us-elections-2000
Let us destroy, but don't let us pretend that we are committing an act of virtue.
Ayn RandTags: ayn-rand
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