A Tribute to Ayn Rand
I posted this in 2008 and I’m reposting it from PopModal today because it seems to be corrupted on my blog and the youtube version has vanished
Projwal Shreshta compiled the quotations from “Atlas Shrugged” and the music, which is Divano, by Era.
From “Atlas Shrugged”:
“I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle.”
“What is morality, she asked.
Judgment to distinguish right and wrong, vision to see the truth, and courage to act upon it, dedication to that which is good, integrity to stand by the good at any price. ”
“The view that man was ever to be drawn by some vision of the unattainable shining ahead, doomed ever to aspire, but not to achieve, my life and my values could not bring me to that.”
“I never found beauty in longing for the impossible and never found the possible to be beyond my reach.”
“I take no pride in hopeless longing; I wouldn’t hold a stillborn aspiration. I’d want to have it, to make it, to live it.”
“I do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and I do not live in chronic dread of disaster. It is no happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that I regard as the abnormal exception in Human Life.”
“Every form of happiness is one, every desire is driven by the same motor.- by our love for a single value, for the highest potentiality of our own existence — and every achievement is an expression of it.
“Every man builds his world in his own image; he has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice. If he abdicates his power, he abdicates the status of man, and the grinding chaos of the irrational is what he achieves as his sphere of existence—by his own choice.”
“Morality is judgment to distinguish right and wrong, vision to see the truth, courage to act upon it, dedication to that which is good, and integrity to stand by it at any price.”
“Joy is the goal of existence, and joy is not to be stumbled upon, but to be achieved, and the act of treason is to let its vision drown in the swamp of the moment’s torture.”
“Devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality; there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.”
“I am. Therefore I’ll think.”
“The choice–the dedication to one’s highest potential–is made by accepting the fact that the noblest act you have ever performed is the act of your mind in the process of grasping that two and two make four.”
“There was no meaning in motors or factories; that their only meaning is in man’s enjoyment of his life, which they served – and that my swelling admiration at the sight of achievement was for the man from which it came.”
“For the power and the radiant vision within him which had seen the earth as a place of enjoyment and had known that the work of achieving one’s happiness was the purpose the sanction and the meaning of life.”
More quotations listed conveniently here:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand
Outstanding. Thanks.
Ayn Rand in one sentence:
“If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows.” Ayn Rand “The Objectivist” Sept 1971
ps. In a recent blog I saw a comment on living via reason vs. ideology. When I went back to copy it, it seems to have been removed. Pls advise.
Which blog was that Barry?
I don’t delete blogs or comments, but someone else has been accessing my computer in the last couple of weeks.
Was it a blog or a comment? And when was it?
My recollection is it was at the end of a blog in red letters about three lines saying reason was a better guide to life than ideology. I have gone through all the blogs and it was either my imagination or was removed.
It’s not your imagination..
I don’t remember such a thing, so either it slipped by me, or it’s another of those weird things happening to my blog.
Today an email account was blocked.
Last week my blog was suspended.
Then users were added and some other odd stuff.
I think someone is letting me know they haven’t forgotten me and I should still mind my p’s and q’s,