Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right
Jennifer BurnsSözler ve Alıntılar
What made some people collectivists and others individualists? Before, Rand had never understood the difference, but now she believed that the basic collectivist principle was “motivation by the value of others versus your own independence.”
Sayfa 43
Roark tells the jury, “Degrees of ability vary, but the basic principle remains the same; the degree of man’s independence, initiative, and personal love for his work determine his talent as a worker and his worth as a man” (681).
Sayfa 87
Rand showed her completed chapters to two outside readers, her literary agent and Frank Lloyd Wright. Rand idolized Wright, seeing him as a true creative genius and the embodiment of the Overman Nietzsche celebrated. She was sure he was a kindred spirit who would appreciate what she had written. But Wright, who had never heard of Rand before, sent the chapters back with a brusque note, rudely telling her the novel was implausible because no architect could have red hair like Roark.
Rand was undeterred. Kahn helped her secure an invitation to a formal banquet where Wright was to speak. She spent three hundred dollars on a matching black velvet dress, shoes, and a cape, a splurge she could ill afford as her savings dwindled. After a formal introduction Wright again rebuffed her overtures. Rand was simply another unknown hoping to cash in on his fame.
Sayfa 52
Each man had the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and these rights were “the unconditional, personal, private, individual possession of each man, granted to him by the fact of his birth and requiring no other sanction.” The role of society, and its only purpose, is to ensure these individual rights Rand explained.
Sayfa 61
One day she probed this difference, asking the other woman what her “goal in life” was. Rand’s abstract query, so typi-cal of her approach to other people, brought a swift and ready response. “Here’s what I want out of life,” her neighbor lectured Rand. “If nobody had an automobile, I would not want one. If automobiles exist and some people don’t have them, I want an automobile. If some people have two automobiles, I want two automobiles.”
Rand was aghast. This piece of petty Hollywood braggadocio opened an entire social universe to her. Here, she thought furiously, was some-one who appeared selfish but was actually self-less.
Sayfa 40
As she explained in a notebook, “Howard Roark: the man who can be and is. Gail Wynand: the man who could have been. Peter Keating: the man who never could be and doesn’t know it. Ellsworth M. Toohey: the man who never could be—and knows it.”
Sayfa 44
“Do you know that my personal crusade in life (in the philosophical sense) is not merely to fight collectivism, nor to fight altruism? These are only consequences, effects, not causes. I am out after the real cause, the real root of evil on earth—the irrational.”
Sayfa 100