Ayn Rand Intellectual Quotations

Collectivism, as an intellectual power and a moral ideal, is dead. But freedom and individualism, and their political expression, capitalism, have not yet been discovered.

The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word 'selfishness' is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual 'package-deal,' which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind.

Just as there is no such thing as a collective or racial mind, so there is no such thing as a collective or racial achievement. There are only individual minds and individual achievements-an d a culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiate d masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.

I am an innovator. This is a term of distinction, a term of honor, rather than something to hide or apologize for. Anyone who has new or valuable ideas to offer stands outside the intellectual status quo. But the status quo is not a stream, let alone a 'mainstream'. It is a stagnant swamp. It is the innovators who carry mankind forward.

A free mind and a free market are corollaries.

But Aristotle's philosophy was the intellect's Declaration of Independence.

Let me by the child in that story and declare that the Emperor is naked-or that America is culturally bankrupt.

The Argument from Intimidation is a confession of intellectual impotence.

A culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiate d masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.