62 Quotes by Leonard Peikoff

Hegel would not have been possible but for Kant, who would not have been possible but for Plato. These three, more than any others, are the intellectual builders of Auschwitz.

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, ”saturating him with the spirit of service... “21.

The unphilosophical majority among men are the ones most helplessly dependent on their era’s dominant ideas.

Religious writers often claim that the cause of Nazism is the secularism or the scientific spirit of the modern world. This evades the facts that the Germans at the time, especially in Prussia, were one of the most religious peoples in Western Europe; that the Weimar Republic was a hotbed of mystic cults, of which Nazism was one; and that Germany’s largest and most devout religious group, the Lutherans, counted themselves among Hitler’s staunchest followers.

Clarity is achieved when concretes are united by a concept and a concept is seen to be a union of those concretes. The two gravest breaches of clarity are: a set of unrelated instances that causes too much pressure on consciousness and a floating abstraction untied to reality. These.

The mental practice that underlies the anti-effort attitude is the act of evasion, of blanking out some fact of reality which one dislikes. This act constitutes the essence of irrationality and, therefore, of evil. Evasion is the Objectivist equivalent of a mortal sin. It is the only such sin that we recognize, because it is what makes possible every other form of moral corruption. 27.

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.

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.