• • • We The Living 
John Gray, New Statesman Atheism  Ayn Rand Institute  Atlas Shrugged  We The Living  Capitalism  Personal life  Inaccurate  Book review.Rand's religion - a brand of evangelical atheism so extreme that Richard Dawkins's version sounds almost reasonable - required that everyone think alike and live in the same way.     Share on Facebook

• • • A symposium starring Aristotle and Ayn Rand 
Ellis Washington, WorldNetDaily Atheism  Atlas Shrugged  The Virtue of Selfishness  Capitalism  Egoism  Personal life  Aristotle: As a conservative I accept the world as it is and distrust the politics of abstract reason, unlike the sophists, humanists and liberals whose empiricism views reason separate from experience. Despite her exceeding love of my ideas, I answer “yes” to the question – Is Ayn Rand’s radical atheism a terminal defect of Objectivism philosophy? Conservatism and capitalism aside, the major tenet of Objectivism philosophy effectively is the worship of selfishness and narcissism, which is antithetical to real conservatism and capitalism, which are rooted in the Republic, the free market, morality, assiduousness, veritas, virtue and God.     Share on Facebook

• • Parallel lives: Liberty or power? 
Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., Mises.org Daily Article Capitalism  Personal life  Let me say a few words about [Alan] Greenspan’s connection to Ayn Rand. The press routinely misunderstands the meaning of this relationship. The only writer who I think has gotten it right, aside from people in the inner circle like George Reisman and Nathaniel Branden, is Frederick Sheehan, author of Panderer to Power. Sheehan points out that Greenspan’s relationship to the Rand circle was always opportunistic and never really had any effect on Greenspan’s life. She was a famous author on the rise. Greenspan was a master of hitching his wagon to any horse on the move. Rand herself called him the “undertaker.” She would frequently ask her associates, “Do you think Alan might basically be a social climber?” Her intuition was, of course, correct.     Share on Facebook

• Quote of the day — July 7, 2010 
Family Security Matters Atheism  Personal life  Isabel Paterson was a Canadian-born journalist and political philosopher, and a staunch defender of capitalism. She was a close associate of Ayn Rand, though they differed on issues of religion (Ayn Rand was an atheist).     Share on Facebook

• • • Far from perfect 
Nistula Hebbar, Financial Express (India) Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  We The Living  Capitalism  Personal life  Review of Ayn Rand and the World She Made, by Anne C. Heller.The book points the finger at the one thing, in fact, which makes most people uncomfortable with Rand’s philosophy despite the brilliance of her premises, the fact that this is an imperfect world, and not everyone is a genius. By demonstrating rather comprehensively the fact that Rand needed the help of a host of mediocre “Ellsworth Tooheys and Paul Keatings”, to succeed and the approbation of the world quite at odds with her devil may care, solitary genius heroes, exposes the vulnerability of the philosopher. In her world, Howard Roark and John Galt may have been oblivious of bad reviews, but Rand went through much pain when her work was “misunderstood.” It is at these intersections of her world and the “real world” that the portrait of Rand is best captured in this book. A must read for all those who thought “man worship” was the way to go, if this doesnt send you back to those dog eared copies of We, the Living, nothing else will.     Share on Facebook

• • For economic progress, lean to the right 
Noel Pearson, The Australian Personal life  There are probably no pure liberals and no pure socialists: we all harbour this dialectical tension or struggle. [....] Of course, Ayn Rand and Joseph Stalin represent extreme examples at either end, but the rest of us give harbour to varying proportions of our inner liberal and socialist.     Share on Facebook

• • • Who was Ayn Rand? 
William R Thomas, The Individualist ( The Atlas Society) Ayn Rand Archives  Atlas Shrugged  Night of January 16th  The Fountainhead  We The Living  Leonard Peikoff  Personal life  Review of Ayn Rand and the World She Made, by Anne C. Heller.Ayn Rand and The World She Madeis biography done right: well-rounded, engaged, judicious, thoroughly-researched, occasionally revelatory, and often moving. It is focused on Ayn Rand as a person. With whom did she have personal relationships? What were the sources of her drive and independent thinking? What were the origins of her story ideas and her aesthetic approach? What was she really like, beneath the mythological view of herself that she presented to readers, fans, and even many friends?     Share on Facebook

• • • Did Greenspan channel or betray Ayn Rand? 
Howard R. Gold, MoneyShow.com Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal  The Fountainhead  Capitalism  Personal life  Rand dubbed Greenspan “the undertaker” for his dark clothes and somber mien. And he remained aloof, harboring skepticism about her philosophy for quite a while. She had doubts about him, too. “Rand worried that Greenspan was an opportunist or social climber,” wrote Jerome Tuccille in his 2002 biography, Alan Shrugged. But as a successful businessman (he co-founded his economic consulting firm in the 1950s), “Alan was their only link to the real world outside Ayn Rand’s living room—outside their own imagination,” Tuccille observed. It turned out to be a Faustian bargain.     Share on Facebook

• • • Turning fiction into reality 
Glenn Beck, FOXNews - Glenn Beck Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism  Personal life  Did you know that Ayn Rand, author of “Atlas Shruugged,” had a hard time getting a publisher in America for her book “The Anthem”? One publisher rejected it on the grounds that the author does not understand socialism, which is particularly funny because she was born in St. Petersburg. She was 12 years old the revolution of 1917 broke out. She was there when it happened and violence took place right in front of her. She lived there until she was in her 20s. She saw the brutality of communism. You’d think the media would love a success story like this, but Ayn Rand was soundly mocked in the media. Even after achieving success, she was still routinely bashed by critics.     Share on Facebook

• • • Why Anthony Daniels smears Ayn Rand 
Alan Germani, The Objective Standard Altruism  Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  Capitalism  Egoism  Personal life  In his recent New Criterion article “Ayn Rand: Engineer of Souls,”1 Anthony Daniels, better known by his pseudonym Theodore Dalrymple, attacks the well-known novelist/philosopher as being, among other things, prone to “crude” errors, a “rationalist who was not entirely rational,” “adept at self-deception,” “incapable of seeing the contradictions in her own work,” and “seriously deficient in sensibility and discrimination across a wide range of important human activities.” But Daniels’s portrayal of Rand and her ideas is a series of gross misrepresentations and smears.     Share on Facebook

• • What would Buckley do? 
Malcolm Kline, Canada Free Press Atheism  Personal life  [In his book, William F. Buckley, Jr.: The Maker Of A Movement, Lee] Edwards brings to life the conflict between the committed Catholic Buckley and the adamantly atheist Ayn Rand. “When Buckley first met Rand, her first words to him, heavily accented by her native Russian tongue, were, ‘You ahrr too intelligent to believe in Gott,’” Edwards writes. “For the next two to three years, Buckley sent the Russian-born writer postcards in liturgical Latin.” “But levity with Miss Rand was not an effective weapon,” Buckley later wrote.     Share on Facebook

• • • Atlas’s Achilles’ heel 
Howard R. Gold, MoneyShow.com Altruism  Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism  Egoism  Personal life  Unfortunately, Rand, whose work offers a ringing defense of individual liberty and capitalism, as I wrote here last week, went so far in her attacks on altruism and praise of selfishness that she probably turned off thousands, if not millions, of potential followers—ambitious, rational people who believed in free markets but also felt an obligation to give something back to others. Like, say, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. There’s plenty of evidence that altruism (by the common definition, not Rand’s) plays an important role in many areas of human life.     Share on Facebook

• • The politics of science on a dying planet 
Frank Joseph Smecker, Dissident Voice Personal life  I could go off on a tangent about Ayn Rand and her despicable objectivism, but let’s just leave it at this: Mother of Objectivism battled depression and an amphetamine addiction her whole life.     Share on Facebook

• • • Ayn Rand: Speed addict? 
The Week Magazine The Fountainhead  Egoism  Personal life  Ayn Rand made “a big deal about living a life that was the embodiment of her philosophy [Objectivism],” says Charles Murray in The Claremont Review of Books. She believed man’s highest calling is to look out for his own self-interest — by trusting in his own judgment and, in Rand’s words, by never attempting “to fake reality in any manner.” Rand’s ideas have influenced millions, and the rise of the Tea Party movement—which sees Rand as a champion in the fight to get the government out of people’s lives—has further fueled her popularity. Still, says Murray, two new biographies [...] suggest that Rand wasn’t always as genuine as she claimed.     Share on Facebook

• • • That’s Objectivist: Ayn Rand in the 21st century 
Benjamin Frisch, Wonkette Egoism  Personal life  Comic.     Share on Facebook

• • Buying the lie: ‘Something for nothing’ 
Frank Miele, Daily Interlake (Kalispell, MT) Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism  Personal life  Ayn Rand, the philosopher and author who lived under the strictures of communism in her early years, somehow managed to predict the decline of America into the thralldom of socialism even when we were at the height of our economic power as an engine of capitalism. Her descriptions of the faltering, dying gasps of American enterprise in the 1957 novel “Atlas Shrugged” are so accurate that it should bring a tear to your eye. We have really made a mess of things, as we bought into the notion that work was no longer a suitable gauge of value. The words of a former worker who is now an unemployed tramp, in the latter part of “Atlas Shrugged,” sum up the horror of creeping socialism brilliantly.     Share on Facebook

• • • Ayn Rand, 1905-1982: Americans still debate her books and ideas 
Steve Ember and Barbara Klein, VOA Learning English Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  Capitalism  Personal life  Audio  Image  Audio and transcript.“The Fountainhead” is an unusual novel for many reasons. It is more than seven hundred pages long, far longer than most books people read for entertainment. It also includes discussions of philosophy, which are not usually found in popular books. In addition, the book criticizes collectivism and religion in a way that many people have found insulting. Most critics did not like “The Fountainhead.” But readers loved it.     Share on Facebook

• • • Re-reading and re-appraising Ayn Rand 
Howard R. Gold, MoneyShow.com Anthem  Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  We The Living  Capitalism  Egoism  Personal life  Rand was a much better writer than the critics acknowledged. Her philosophy deeply reflected her childhood experiences in Russia. She gave us a brilliant defense of the moral basis for capitalism and a scary account of how, step by step, liberty can be taken away by a power-hungry government. But for me, she falls short in her ultimate goal: to create in Objectivism a universal philosophy of economics, politics, ethics, and epistemology. Why? Because she focuses almost exclusively on a small elite of high achievers and has little interest in the aspirations of ordinary people. And she wants to change, not accept, human nature.     Share on Facebook

• • • Randed for life 
Nilanjana S Roy, Sify News (India) Ayn Rand Institute  Anthem  Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  Personal life  Review of Ayn Rand and the World She Made, by Anne C. Heller.For all that thousands of readers who outgrow Ayn Rand by their late twenties, the list of the ones who don’t is illustrious — John Hospers, Alan Greenspan, Robert Mayhew and other venerables have all indicated their deep debt to her ideas. The contemporary reception to The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged is telling: many critics slammed the books for their didactic, “offensively pedestrian” style, and they were right. Many readers bought the books anyway, drawn to Rand’s almost comically force-of-nature heroes and her perversely suffering, noble heroines.     Share on Facebook

• • Ideal, by Ayn Rand, announces cast 
New York Theatre Guide Night of January 16th  Personal life  The comedy was written in 1934, during a time of great professional turmoil in Rand’s life. At the time, her novel "We the Living" was rejected by a succession of publishers for being "too intellectual" and too opposed to Soviet Russia; her play "Night of January 16th" had not yet found a producer; and Miss Rand's meager savings were running out. Ideal was written originally as a novelette and then extensively revised and turned into a stage play.     Share on Facebook