The Passion of Ayn Rand
Barbara BrandenSözler ve Alıntılar
“As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy,” she told the rows of gray-uniformed cadets and West Point officials and professors who overflowed the auditorium. “Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation—or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind’s wings should have grown.”
Sayfa 378 - The speech at West Point, March of 1974
“That was the real time of starvation, those years,” Alice later grimly recalled. One evening, after a dinner consisting of a handful of dried peas, she felt her legs sagging under her. She sank to the floor, too weakened by hunger and fright to stand. A small portion of peas was being saved for Fronz’s arrival home. “May I have... just one of Father’s peas?” Alice asked. Her mother handed her a single pea, on her face the most terrible anguish Alice had ever seen in a human face.
Sayfa 44
The words are Robert Stadler’s. The voice is Ayn Rand’s.
Years later, Ayn would write a scene in Atlas Shrugged in which Dagny Taggart shows the brilliant scientist Dr. Robert Stadler the remnants of a motor that represents a great new scientific breakthrough. “ ‘It’s so wonderful,’ said Dr. Stadler, his voice low. ‘It’s so wonderful to see a great, new, crucial idea which is not mine!.. Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest some- one’s work prove greater than their own—they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal—for a mind to respect and an achievement to admire. They bare their teeth at you from out of their rat holes, thinking that you take pleasure in letting your brilliance dim theirs—when you would give a year of your life to see a flicker of talent any- where among them. They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don’t know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear. They have no way of knowing what he feels when surrounded by inferiors—hatred? no, not hatred, but boredom—the terrible, hopeless, draining, paralyzing boredom. Of what account are praise and adulation from men whom you don’t respect? Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?’”
Sayfa 166
Seeking a clue to the principle involved, she asked the young woman one day, “What is your goal in life? What is it that you want to achieve?” The young woman answered immediately, as if the answer had long been clear in her mind:
“I’ll tell you what I want. If nobody had an automobile, then I would want to have one automobile. If some people have one, then I want to have two."
...
The woman, Ayn thought, would conventionally be called “selfish.” But wasn’t a 'self'—that which thinks, judges, values, and chooses—precisely what she lacked? I want to achieve things that are important—important objectively, in reality, in fact—thought Ayn; she wants only to make an impression on others. I choose my own goals, I decided that I wanted to write, and what I wanted to write; she struggles to imitate the goals chosen by others. I set my | own standards; her desires are dictated by the standards of others. Why? What is the concept that will name the essence of the difference involved..?
Sayfa 132
“Man,” she wrote, “is a being of self-made soul.”
"...Great romance is important, and all of my projected novels had great romances—but it is not the main concern. Love has to be part of a great cause, never the main focus for the man or for the woman."
Sayfa 37
... One of them, concerned about how he would communicate her philosophy to book sellers, asked her jokingly: “Miss Rand—could you give the essence of your philosophy while standing on one foot?” She did. She said: “Metaphysics—objective reality; Epistemology—treason; Ethics—self-interest; Politics—capitalism.”
Sayfa 294