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2 February 2005  

David Veksler chose this quote to mark today:

In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that man’s proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it’s yours.

12:04 PM |

Don't miss Ian Hamet's personal reflections on the occasion of Ayn Rand's centenary.

11:25 AM |

Starting new ventures on Ayn Rand's birthday is becoming a habit for me. Last year, Selective Memory was inaugurated on this day. This year, another new site, and one that couldn't be started on a more appropriate day. Ladies and gentlement, I give you Randex, whose mission is to record online news references to Ayn Rand and Objectivism. To start, the site is at the bare minimum of functionality I could live with. More features should be appearing over the coming weeks.

12:37 AM |

One hundred years ago today, Ayn Rand was born. I very much liked the piece Onkar Ghate wrote for ARI to mark this event. An excerpt:

It remains... all too common for a young person to be told that his interest in Ayn Rand is a stage he will soon grow out of. "It's fine to believe in that now," the refrain goes, "but wait until you're older. You'll discover that life is not like that."

But when one actually considers the essence of what Rand teaches, the accusation that her philosophy is childish over-simplification stands as condemnation not of her ideas but of the adult world from which the accusation stems.

The key to Rand's popularity is that she appeals to the idealism of youth. She wrote in 1969: "There is a fundamental conviction which some people never acquire, some hold only in their youth, and a few hold to the end of their days--the conviction that ideas matter." The nature of this conviction? "That ideas matter means that knowledge matters, that truth matters, that one's mind matters. And the radiance of that certainty, in the process of growing up, is the best aspect of youth."

To sustain this youthful conviction throughout life, Rand argues, one must achieve a radical independence of mind.

One of my favorite Ayn Rand quotes might have been appropriate for this piece:

To hold an unchanging youth is to reach, at the end, the vision with which one started.

12:11 AM |