62 Quotes by Leonard Peikoff

We dare not brush aside unexplained a horror such as Nazism. If we are to avoid a fate like that of Germany, we must find out what made such a fate possible. We must find out what, at root, is required to turn a country, Germany or any other, into a Nazi dictatorship; and then we must uproot that root. We.

Under communism, there is collective ownership of property de jure. Under Nazism, there is the same collective ownership de facto.

Nazism in politics was a form of statism. In principle, it did not represent a new approach to government; it was a continuation of the political absolutism – the absolute monarchies, the oligarchies, the theocracies, the random tyrannies – which has characterized most of human history.

Racial subjectivism holds that a man’s inborn racial constitution determines his mental processes, his intellectual outlook, his thought patterns, his feelings, his conclusions – and that these conclusions, however well established, are valid only for members of a given race, who share the same underlying constitution.

In degree, however, the total state does differ from its predecessors: it represents statism pressed to its limits, in theory and in practice, devouring the last remnants of the individual.

To liberate humanity from intelligence, Hitler counted on the doctrines of irrationalism. To rid men of conscience, he counted on the morality of altruism. To free the world of freedom, he counted on the idea of collectivism.

In a primacy-of-consciousness philosophy, virtue consists of allegiance to the ruling consciousness, such as God or society. In Ayn Rand’s philosophy, virtue consists of allegiance to existence; it consists of a man’s recognizing facts and then acting accordingly.

The principles of morality are a product not of feeling, but of cognition.

The nationalists, at heart, were socialists. The socialists, at heart, were nationalists.