Leonard Peikoff > Quotes

“An individual can be hurt in countless ways by other men's irrationality, dishonesty, injustice. Above all, he can be disappointed, perhaps grievously, by the vices of a person he had once trusted or loved. But as long as his property is not expropriated and he remains unmolested physically, the damage he sustains is essentially spiritual, not physical; in such a case, the victim alone has the power and the responsibility of healing his wounds. He remains free: free to think, to learn from his experiences, to look elsewhere for human relationships; he remains free to start afresh and to pursue his happiness.”
― Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand

“Every argument for God and every attribute ascribed to Him rests on a false metaphysical premise. None can survive for a moment on a correct metaphysics....

Existence exists, and only existence exists. Existence is a primary: it is uncreated, indestructible, eternal. So if you are to postulate something beyond existence—some supernatural realm—you must do it by openly denying reason, dispensing with definitions, proofs, arguments, and saying flatly, “To Hell with argument, I have faith.” That, of course, is a willful rejection of reason.

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.”
― Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand

“To save the world is the
simplest thing in the world.
All one has to do is think.”
― Leonard Peikoff

“The worse the coming future, the more it should motivate its opponents.”
― Leonard Peikoff, The DIM Hypothesis: Why the Lights of the West Are Going Out

“The man who waits for reality to write the truth inside his soul waits in vain.”
― Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand

“Principles make it simple.”
― Leonard Peikoff

“The artist is the closest man comes to being God.”
― Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand

“The authority of the Führer is not limited by checks and controls, by special autonomous bodies or individual rights, but it is free and independent, all-inclusive and unlimited,” said Ernst Huber, an official party spokesman, in 1933.”
― Leonard Peikoff, The Cause of Hitler's Germany

“Logic, order, truth, reason, we consign them all to the oblivion of death,” said one Surrealist manifesto. We must “cultivate the hatred of intelligence,” said the leader of the Futurists, Filippo Marinetti, an artist hailed by Mussolini as the John the Baptist of Fascism.17”
― Leonard Peikoff, The Cause of Hitler's Germany

“I believe that a proper education in grade school would achieve much more for the general public than getting an M.A. in the best college today ever would. You do not need millions of courses across decades and decades. That is a modern absurdity. It is the result of a worthless, self-perpetuating educational bureaucracy. Even with the explosion of knowledge, you can give people a proper, thorough education by the time they are a normal high school graduate.”
― Leonard Peikoff, Teaching Johnny to Think

“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.”
― Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand

“The deepest roots of this modern shift are twofold: in epistemology, the romanticist advocacy of feeling as superior to reason; in ethics, the altruist advocacy of others as superior to self. The result is a view of morality in which the ruling standard is: the feelings of others.”
― Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels

“The process of spreading a philosophy by means of free discussion among thinking adults is long and complex. From Plato to the present, it has been the dream of social planners to circumvent this process and, instead, to inject a controversial ideology directly into the plastic, unformed minds of children—by means of seizing a country’s educational system and turning it into a vehicle for indoctrination. In this way one may capture an entire generation without intellectual resistance, in a single coup d’école.”
― Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels

“Social justice” in this view not only allows but demands the use of force against the non-sacrificial individual; it demands that others put a stop to his evil. Thus has moral fervor been joined to the rule of physical force, raising it from a criminal tactic to a governing principle of human relationships.”
― Leonard Peikoff, The Cause of Hitler's Germany

“Statism and the advocacy of reason are philosophical opposites. They cannot coexist—neither in a philosophic system nor in a nation.”
― Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels

“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.”
― Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand

“The nationalists, at heart, were socialists. The socialists, at heart, were nationalists.”
― Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels

“The principles of morality are a product not of feeling, but of cognition.”
― Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand

“A philosophy of education, in short, is essential to being a proper parent; otherwise, you are merely turning your child over to blind chance.”
― Leonard Peikoff, Teaching Johnny to Think

“[There is] a widespread approach to ideas which Objectivism repudiates altogether: agnosticism. I mean this term in a sense which applies to the question of God, but to many other issues also, such as extra-sensory perception or the claim that the stars influence man’s destiny. In regard to all such claims, the agnostic is the type who says, “I can’t prove these claims are true, but you can’t prove they are false, so the only proper conclusion is: I don’t know; no one knows; no one can know one way or the other.”

The agnostic viewpoint poses as fair, impartial, and balanced. See how many fallacies you can find in it. Here are a few obvious ones: First, the agnostic allows the arbitrary into the realm of human cognition. He treats arbitrary claims as ideas proper to consider, discuss, evaluate—and then he regretfully says, “I don’t know,” instead of dismissing the arbitrary out of hand. Second, the onus-of-proof issue: the agnostic demands proof of a negative in a context where there is no evidence for the positive. “It’s up to you,” he says, “to prove that the fourth moon of Jupiter did not cause your sex life and that it was not a result of your previous incarnation as the Pharaoh of Egypt.” Third, the agnostic says, “Maybe these things will one day be proved.” In other words, he asserts possibilities or hypotheses with no jot of evidential basis.

The agnostic miscalculates. He thinks he is avoiding any position that will antagonize anybody. In fact, he is taking a position which is much more irrational than that of a man who takes a definite but mistaken stand on a given issue, because the agnostic treats arbitrary claims as meriting cognitive consideration and epistemological respect. He treats the arbitrary as on a par with the rational and evidentially supported. So he is the ultimate epistemological egalitarian: he equates the groundless and the proved. As such, he is an epistemological destroyer. The agnostic thinks that he is not taking any stand at all and therefore that he is safe, secure, invulnerable to attack. The fact is that his view is one of the falsest—and most cowardly—stands there can be.”
― Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand

“The mental practice that underlies the anti-effort attitude is the act of evasion, of blanking out some fact of reality which one dislikes. This act constitutes the essence of irrationality and, therefore, of evil. Evasion is the Objectivist equivalent of a mortal sin. It is the only such sin that we recognize, because it is what makes possible every other form of moral corruption. 27”
― Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand

“The Nazis take the skeleton in the closet of centuries and rattle it boastfully. Force, they declare, will always be necessary, since it is in the nature of human life (which is true, if one accepts their concept of human life).”
― Leonard Peikoff, The Cause of Hitler's Germany

“The language and themes of the classics are too difficult for today’s students to grasp; one does not teach Shakespeare to savages, or to civilized children being turned into savages.”
― Leonard Peikoff, Teaching Johnny to Think

“Induction means really the process of coming to conclusions on the basis of observation. Deduction is the process of coming to conclusions on the basis of earlier abstractions.”
― Leonard Peikoff, Understanding Objectivism: A Guide to Learning Ayn Rand's Philosophy

“Socialism” for the Nazis denotes the principle of collectivism as such and its corollary, statism—in every field of human action, including but not limited to economics. “To be a socialist,” says Goebbels, “is to submit the I to the thou; socialism is sacrificing the individual to the whole.”9”
― Leonard Peikoff, The Cause of Hitler's Germany

“I say close down the schools of education. At most, all that is required is a one-year post-high school course on practical advice: tips on motivating;”
― Leonard Peikoff, Teaching Johnny to Think

“The rational (the good) has nothing to gain from the irrational (the evil),” observes Ayn Rand, “except a share of its failures and crimes. . . .”17”
― Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand

“The fundamental goal of education, writes Dewey, ”is the development of a spirit of social co-operation and community life....“ The goal is to foster the child’s ”social capacity“—by, among other things, ”saturating him with the spirit of service....“21”
― Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels

“Under communism, there is collective ownership of property de jure. Under Nazism, there is the same collective ownership de facto.”
― Leonard Peikoff, The Cause of Hitler's Germany

“Ayn Rand defines “value” as “that which one acts to gain and/or keep.”3 “Value” denotes the object of an action: it is that which some entity’s action is directed to acquiring or preserving”
― Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand