Leonard Peikoff Quotations

Each man must reach his own verdict, by weighing all the relevant evidence.

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

The more you learn, if you learn it properly, the more clear you become and the more you know.

If you grasp what totalitarianism is, you would never talk about the rights of the father. In that kind of society, he can only watch his son die. You say he needs a father; he needs a life first.

Now, the United States' response, the western response to this is a continuation of the appeasement that was started back in the '50s with Eisenhower when Iran seized western oil companies. The Americans, the British, and the Israelis, as I remember, launched an attack to try to reclaim it and - or at least the British and the Israelis did and Eisenhower vetoed it.

Unlike the Marxists, the Nazis did not advocate public ownership of the means of production. They did demand that the government oversee and run the nation's economy. The issue of legal ownership is secondary; what counts is the issue of control. Private citizens, therefore, may continue to hold titles to property-so long as the state res...erves to itself the unqualified right to regulate the use of their property.

The worse the coming future, the more it should motivate its opponents.

To send a child to rot in the prison of Cuba for the alleged sake of his own well-being is criminal hypocrisy.

What one needs to know in order to appraise a man morally is not: what did his mother say or do when he was three? The proper question is: what does he say and do now?

Ayn Rand held that art is a 're-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgements.' By its nature, therefore, a novel (like a statue or a symphony) does not require or tolerate an explanatory preface; it is a self-contained universe, aloof from commentary, beckoning the reader to enter, perceive, respond.

Now if you ask me, in conclusion, "Well, what, then should properly be done?" Obviously war, but I mean in regard to this issue I would say: Any way possible permission should be refused and if they go ahead and build it, the government should bomb it out of existence, evacuating it first, with no compensation to any of the property owners involved in this monstrosity.

Objectivism advocates reason as man's sole means of knowledge, and therefore, for the reasons I have already given, it is atheist. It denies any supernatural dimension presented as a contradiction of nature, of existence. This applies not only to God, but also to every variant of the supernatural ever advocated or to be advocated. In other words, we accept reality, and that's all.

To save the world is the simplest thing in the world. All one has to do is think.