Friday Filosophy v.06.17.2022

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Friday Filosophy v.06.17.2022

Alice O’Connor (born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum Russian: Алиса Зиновьевна Розенбаум .February 2, 1905 – March 6, 1982), better known by her pen name Ayn Rand was a Russian-born American writer, screenwriter, playwright and philosopher. 

She published several popular books in the United States during the mid-1900s, including her two best-selling novels, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, plus We the Living and Anthem. Her novels promoted a viewpoint of laissez-faire capitalism as a political and social goal. It is a kind of political philosophy known in the U.S.A. as libertarian conservatism. She called this philosophy ‘objectivism‘. 

Rand was born in St. Petersburg, Russia and grew up during the Russian Revolution, in the years after World War I. She left Russia to visit relatives in Chicago in the United States when she was 21 years old. She did not want to return to live under Communism, and stayed in the US. She changed her name, partly to protect her family in Russia. Rand moved to California to become a movie writer.

Movies at the time did not have sound, and stories were mimed on camera. Dialogue was not important, so Rand could write simple stories while she improved her English language skills.

Rand met Frank O’Connor on a movie set, when they both appeared as extras. When O’Connor married Rand in 1929, she could live permanently in America. She later became an American citizen. O’Connor gave up his acting career, to work full-time so Rand could write full-time. Later he retired, when Rand’s work made a good income. He began painting late in his life. He died in 1979.

Rand was a longtime tobacco smoker. She had lung cancer, but she recovered from the disease after surgery. She died of cardiovascular disease in New York City on March 6, 1982.

  • A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.
  • Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values. 
  • The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me. 
  • Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone. 
  • The ladder of success is best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity. 
  • We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force. 
  • Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. 
  • Civilization is the process of setting man free from men. 
  • The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. 
  • Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).
  • Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values. 
  • Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision. 
  • Upper classes are a nation’s past; the middle class is its future. 
  • Government ‘help’ to business is just as disastrous as government persecution… the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off.
  • Potentially, a government is the most dangerous threat to man’s rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims. 
  • Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men’s stupidity, but your talent to their reason. 
  • Do not ever say that the desire to ‘do good’ by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives. 
  • When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is learning to understand and control the behavior of crop plants and domestic animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized.

The Time is Now.

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