ARE YOU AN INTELLECTUAL? Why not?

by Terry 102 Replies latest jw friends

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  Open mind

  Ayn Rand anyone?
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  Terry

  Ayn Rand anyone?

  Bull's eye!

  I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
  Ayn Rand
  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.
  Ayn Rand
  
  Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.
  Ayn Rand
  
  Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting for us in our graves - or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.
  Ayn Rand
  
  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.
  Ayn Rand
  
  Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.
  Ayn Rand
  
  
  Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice.
  Ayn Rand
  
  Evil requires the sanction of the victim.
  Ayn Rand
  
  Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins.
  Ayn Rand
  
  From the smallest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from one attribute of man - the function of his reasoning mind.
  Ayn Rand
  
  God... a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive.
  Ayn Rand
  
  
  Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values.
  Ayn Rand
  
  
  If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.
  Ayn Rand
  
  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).
  Ayn Rand
  
  Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.
  Ayn Rand
  
  It only stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.
  Ayn Rand
  
  Just as man can't exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one's rights into reality, to think, to work and keep the results, which means: the right of property.
  Ayn Rand
  
  Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.
  Ayn Rand
  
  Man's unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself.
  Ayn Rand
  
  Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason.
  Ayn Rand
  
  Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.
  Ayn Rand
  
  Money is the barometer of a society's virtue.
  Ayn Rand
  
  Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth, the man who would make his fortune no matter where he started.
  Ayn Rand
  
  People create their own questions because they are afraid to look straight. All you have to do is look straight and see the road, and when you see it, don't sit looking at it - walk.
  Ayn Rand
  
  Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone.
  Ayn Rand
  
  Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter.
  Ayn Rand
  
  So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of all money?
  Ayn Rand
  
  The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see.
  Ayn Rand
  
  The ladder of success is best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity.
  Ayn Rand
  
  The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap.
  Ayn Rand
  
  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.
  Ayn Rand
  
  The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.
  Ayn Rand
  
  The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me.
  Ayn Rand
  
  The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
  Ayn Rand
  
  The truth is not for all men, but only for those who seek it.
  Ayn Rand
  
  The worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt.
  Ayn Rand
  
  There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.
  Ayn Rand
  
  There can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions to an individual, but permitted to a mob.
  Ayn Rand
  
  There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.
  Ayn Rand
  
  Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision.
  Ayn Rand
  
  To achieve, you need thought. You have to know what you are doing and that's real power.
  Ayn Rand
  
  To say "I love you" one must first be able to say the "I."
  Ayn Rand
  
  Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future.
  Ayn Rand
  
  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.
  Ayn Rand
  
  Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think.
  Ayn Rand
  
  When I die, I hope to go to Heaven, whatever the Hell that is.
  Ayn Rand
  
  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.
  Ayn Rand
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  VoidEater

  "In a McCall's magazine interview, Rand stated that while women are competent to be President, no rational woman should seek that position; she later explained that it would be psychologically damaging to the woman."

  Let's hear it for sexism!

  Rand was trapped in her subjective, one-dimensional philosophy.
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  Terry

  "In a McCall's magazine interview, Rand stated that while women are competent to be President, no rational woman should seek that position; she later explained that it would be psychologically damaging to the woman."

  Let's hear it for sexism!

  Should Ayn Rand Have Been a Feminist?

  by Bryan Register
  

  In 1963, The Objectivist Newsletter printed a positive review by Edith Efron of what many regard as the founding document of contemporary feminism, Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. But in 1971, Ayn Rand had this to say about the women's movement:

  Just as the egalitarians ride on the historical prestige of those who fought for political equality, and struggle to achieve the opposite-so their special sorority, Women's Lib, rides on the historical prestige of women who fought for individual rights against government power, and struggles to get special privileges by means of government power. (Ayn Rand, "The Age of Envy," The New Left . New York: Signet, 1975. p. 173)

  The heroine of Atlas Shrugged, Dagny Taggart, is one of the strongest women to appear in world literature-and she made her appearance in 1957, when virtually all Americans expected women to become full-time housewives. But in her 1971 comments, Rand wrote that "It is because men are metaphysically the dominant sex . . . that a thing such as Women's Lib could gain plausibility and sympathy among today's intellectuals" (New Left, p. 175, emphasis added).

  When Alvin Toffler interviewed her for Playboy magazine in 1964, Rand said, "I would not attempt to prescribe what kind of work a man should do, and I would not attempt it with regard to women. . . . Women can choose their own work according to their own purposes and premises in the same manner as men do." But in her "Answer to Readers" in 1969, Rand said that "By the nature of her duties and daily activities," a female president ". . . would become the most unfeminine, sexless, metaphysically inappropriate, and rationally revolting figure of all: a matriarch" (The Voice of Reason, ed. Leonard Peikoff, New York: Meridian, 1990, p. 269).
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  VoidEater

  No, I have not joined Mensa. While I have one Mensa member friend, I find most of the members just enough out of alignment with my interests that we don't gel well. All of the members I have met have indeed been intellectually advanced. Many of them have also been good natured and sweet people, in some cases lacking in certain social graces (being rather more introverted than even myself).
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  VoidEater

  Terry: And there you go. A terribly blighted, unimaginative, and ungrounded imposition of superficial gender-based roles. A deeply rooted misunderstanding of the potential for humanity, resulting in hyper-judgmental drivel.

  Matriarch = irrational and revolting.

  Couldn't have made the point clearer myself.
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  Terry

  Terry: And there you go. A terribly blighted, unimaginative, and ungrounded imposition of superficial gender-based roles. A deeply rooted misunderstanding of the potential for humanity, resulting in hyper-judgmental drivel.

  Matriarch = irrational and revolting.

  Couldn't have made the point clearer myself.

  Is that some sort of argument you are offering?
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  Open mind

  Ayn Rand was a huge head-slap to me when I read her in my late teens, early twenties.

  But there's no bleeding heart there. And I'd like just a little bit of that.

  In Ayn Rand's perfect world, what should be done with the mentally/physically disabled child who will require a small fortune to successfully reach adulthood? His parent's can't afford the care he needs. Shove him out on an ice flow to die?

  Terry, do you know of a good knock-down, drag-out debate between a hard-core Objectivist and someone who takes the position I just did?

  If you want, we can go at it, but I doubt I would do my side justice.

  om
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  BurnTheShips

  I tend to agree with Terry a bit on Rand, I love her anti-Statist philosophy.

  But she goes overboard on too many other things.

  Altruism is not immoral.

  With a professionally tested IQ of 142, I am intellectual enough to grasp that.

  BurnTheSynapses.
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  S3RAPH1M

  Jacque Fresco inspired me to walk the life long journey of a multidisciplinarian.