I’ve come to love the writings of Ayn Rand so much. The woman is great. I first got to know of her name in a discord server (@mughat’s chat room), when @mughat told us to read the virtues of selfishness by Ayn Rand.
Ayn Rand was a Russian – American philosopher and novelist. She’s also a playwright and a screenwriter, which actually started when she moved to the United States and met with the famed director Cecil B. DeMille to work as an extra in his film The King of Kings. Her real name is Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum, making Ayn Rand her pen name.
Her main ideology is built on what is known as objectivism. “Objectivism is the existence of truths independent of the mind or perception”. Definition taken from “Wordweb” mobile application.
Objectivism is derived from the ideology that the human knowledge and values are objective, in the sense that they exist and determined by the nature of reality and it is to be discovered by one’s mind, and not by the thoughts of an individual.
Her words have changed hundreds of lives and I love her for that. I’ve been watching youtube videos of some of her interviews and excerpts from her books like atlas shrugged (1957) with the character John Galt. The first time I watched John Galt’s trial I was so happy. The knowledge I learnt from the 4 min video was immense.
I have made my mind to read all her novels and letters if I get my hand on them.
These are some of my favorite quotes from Ayn Rand
My philosophy, Objectivism, holds that:
- Reality exists as an objective absolute—facts are facts, independent of man’s feelings, wishes, hopes or fears.
- Reason (the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses) is man’s only means of perceiving reality, his only source of knowledge, his only guide to action, and his basic means of survival.
- Man—every man—is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.
- The ideal political-economic system is laissez-faire capitalism. It is a system where men deal with one another, not as victims and executioners, nor as masters and slaves, but as traders, by free, voluntary exchange to mutual benefit. It is a system where no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force, and no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. The government acts only as a policeman that protects man’s rights; it uses physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use, such as criminals or foreign invaders. In a system of full capitalism, there should be (but, historically, has not yet been) a complete separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.
The Objectivist Newsletter “Introducing Objectivism,”.
The Objectivist Newsletter, Aug. 1962, 35