62 Quotes by Leonard Peikoff

No weird cultural aberration produced Nazism. No intellectual lunatic fringe miraculously overwhelmed a civilized country. It is modern philosophy – not some peripheral aspect of it, but the most central of its mainstreams – which turned the Germans into a nation of killers. The land of poets and philosophers was brought down by its poets and philosophers.

The defenders of capitalism spent their time broadcasting the vibrations of guilt and futility. Implicitly or explicitly, they were telling the country: human intelligence is impotent to control the course of society, men are helpless in the face of their own motivation, laissez-faire appeals to the evil in men, but men are stuck with it.

Vice, in the Objectivist view, is not a rewarding policy; it is unconsciousness-willful, self-induced unconsciousness, while one continues to move around and function. To a conscious organism no course of behavior can be more dangerous.

An interest,” writes Kant, “is present only in a dependent will which is not of itself always in accord with reason; in the divine will we cannot conceive of an interest.

In an advanced, civilized country, a handful of men were able to gain for their criminal schemes the enthusiastic backing of millions of decent, educated, law-abiding citizens. What is the factor that made this possible?

In any compromise between food and poison,” Ayn Rand writes, “it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.

Most men, however, do not consider such issues in explicit terms. They absorb their ideas – implicitly, eclectically, and with many contradictions – from the cultural atmosphere around them, building into their souls without identifying it the various ideological vibrations emanating from school and church and arts and media and mores.

Evil, for Objectivism, means the willful ignorance or defiance of reality. This has to mean: that which cannot deal with reality, that which is whim-ridden, context-dropping, self-contradictory. Evil is consistent in only one regard: its essence is consistently at war with all the values and virtues human life requires.

The victim’s submission to utter senselessness becomes the defeat of sense. His obeisance to absurdity becomes the refutation of logic.